Shocking though his ideas may have been, no one would have denied the ubiquity of flattery and lies in a fallen world. In his mid-seventeenth-century collection of worldly-wise aphorisms, The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence, the Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián may have lamented his age’s fall from truth and openness into a world of malice, from an Age of Gold into the Age of Iron in which “good men … seem to be the relics of better times,” but John of Salisbury had already groaned that lament more than five centuries earlier.146 The entire tradition of court writing had declared, as if with one voice, that the world was full of liars and flatterers, illusions and facades, and that in such a world we might sometimes need to lie to the liars, flatter the flatterers. Mandeville’s promotion of flattery and lies to the status of unadulterated goods draws deeply from this tradition but also, especially, from the early modern emphasis on courtesy, refinement, and civil conversation. Even if writers like Guazzo and Walker stressed the need to be good Christians, they also understood that it was well nigh impossible to distinguish the truly virtuous from those who merely play the part for ulterior motives. It was precisely this fascination with acting appropriately that gave particular weight to the age-old metaphor of world as stage. “I am convinced that in many situations,” writes Antoine Gombaud, the self-appointed Chevalier de Méré, “that it is not without benefit that one looks at what one is doing as theatre, and imagines oneself as a character in a play.”147 Madeleine de Souvré, the Marquise de Sablé, whose mid-seventeenth-century Parisian salon would prove an incubator for the style of maxim for which La Rochefoucauld would become famous, remarked on this phenomenon with a tinge of regret. “If we had as much care to be what we should be as we have to deceive others by disguising what we are,” she writes, “we would be able to show ourselves just as we are, without having the trouble of disguising ourselves.”148 Gracián would make a similar observation when he noted, “Things don’t pass for what they are, but for how they appear. Few look within and many are content with appearances.”149
While many writers mourned this alleged loss of interest in real virtue, a few couldn’t help but note that it hardly mattered to society itself. Whatever the reasons that motivated people to behave courteously, the effect was the same. The Jansenist theologian Pierre Nicole latched onto this curious phenomenon in his essay from the 1670s, Of Charity, and Self-Love. “Although there is nothing so opposite to charity,” he writes, “which relates all to God, as self-love, which relates all to self, yet there is nothing so resembling the effects of charity, as those of self-love.” Self-love, the consequence of original sin, makes men incapable of caring for anyone but themselves, rendering them tyrannical, “violent, unjust, cruel, ambitious, flatterers, envious, insolent and querulous.”150 However much we love these passions in ourselves, we despise them in others, and if it were possible we would make everyone submit to our most passing egotistical whims. But this is simply not possible, and as much as we love dominating others, Nicole contends, so much the more do we love ourselves and want others to love and respect us, to flatter and admire us.151 So begins the slow process of adapting our prideful selves to other prideful selves as we conceal our rapacity and will to dominate behind acceptable and useful actions. We perform acts of kindness and courage, are courteous and solicitous to others, not because we care about them, but simply because such actions will bring us praise, adulation, and honors. “There is hardly any action,” Nicole explains, “whereto we are carried by charity that would please God, where-unto self-love cannot engage us to please men.”152 And this, Nicole contends, is the sum total of human civility.153
Not only is it impossible for others to discern the true motivation of our actions, our motivations are often, perhaps always, invisible even to ourselves. La Rochefoucauld stressed this problem throughout his volume of maxims, observing that “we are so used to disguising ourselves from others that we end up disguising ourselves from ourselves.”154 Nicole suggests something similar, arguing that we often act out of sheer habit, without really attending to our motivations at all.155 Significantly, Nicole suggests that God himself makes it impossible even for the virtuous to know whether their actions are just. Human nature is so corrupt that such knowledge would overwhelm us. If we knew we were virtuous or, at the very least, that some of our actions were virtuous, we would all too easily become self-satisfied, vain, and proud, with what little virtue we did possess soon destroyed. “This obscurity does not take away virtues from him,” Nicole explains, “but hinders him from losing them, by keeping him always in humility and fear, and making him mistrust all his works, and to rely on God’s mercy.”156 If our lack of self-knowledge keeps us humble, it also renders charity completely irrelevant, at least here and now, in this world, in this society. From John of Salisbury to Nathaniel Walker, it was charity that had justified our lies, deceptions, and hypocritical civilities. In this tradition, intentions mattered in the difficult prudential calculations that each and every one of us needed to make to navigate our way through a world full of lies. The early modern conception of refinement, courtesy, and civil conversation, with its emphasis on decorum and amiability, may have trivialized the significance of these judgments, but these writers still framed their discussions in terms of charity and virtue. Even Gracián, whose Pocket Oracle ranks among the most cynical accounts of how to survive in “civil society,” concluded with a lengthy aphorism, “In a word, a saint,” in which he stressed that “virtue links all perfections and is the center of all happiness.”157
Certainly Nicole cared about the difference between true charity and self-love. It was for him the difference between those whose futures rested with God and those whose futures promised to be much less pleasant. Important in principle, as Nicole works through what he takes to be the implications of his ideas, it is a distinction that proves meaningless in our lives. Self-love’s deceptions are so subtle, so perfectly suited to resemble virtue, that love of self can even drive us to imitate the devoutly religious, saints and holy men, and it can motivate us to live lives of brutal asceticism, penance, and more. “In fine,” he writes, “self-love is also capable to make us suffer even death with joy and to the end there may be no certain way to distinguish it from charity by martyrdoms, the saints do teach us after St Paul, that there are martyrs of vanity as well as of charity.” Even if such religious exertion were not almost always undone through pride, Nicole recognizes that few are capable or even motivated “to embrace this kind of life so contrary to nature.”158
With human happiness through religious austerity ruled out, Nicole sees nothing for it but to foster the mysterious machinations of self-love so as to foster at least an imitation of a charitable society. “Thus one may say truly,” Nicole concludes, “that absolutely to reform the world, that’s to say, to banish all the vices and the gross disorders therein, and to make mankind happy even in this life, there needs only instead of charity, to give everyone a harmless self-love which may be able to discern its true interests, and to incline thereto by the ways of which true reason shall discover to it.” Laws promoting socially useful behaviors, shaming and punishing deleterious behaviors, can create an enlightened self-love motivated toward the facade of goodness, even in the utter absence of charity. Such a society would be no less corrupt before God, but Nicole seems willing to accept a society built on lying and deceptive self-interest, yet so constrained through appropriate laws that “we should see everywhere nothing but the form and characters of charity.”159
It was precisely this false form of charity that Mandeville sought to uncover, and especially the lies that people told about their so-called charity. Mandeville, like Nicole, had no doubt that self-interest was the hidden hand that led to a healthy society, but he had no patience with the hypocrites who considered their self-serving behavior to be truly good. “Virtue is a very fashionable word, and some of the most luxurious are extremely fond of the amiable sound,” Mandeville explains in the preface to The Fable of the Bees’s seco
nd volume. “All court philosophers are agreed, nothing can be lovely or desirable, that is mortifying or uneasy,” and all the world requires of the so-called virtuous man is “a civil behavior among the fair in public, and a deportment inoffensive both in words and actions is all the chastity the polite world requires in men.” But, of course, this isn’t virtue in any real sense. Not only does society’s emphasis on courtesy provide men the needed cover to revel in every form of vice in private and when out of sight, it flatters their vanity, shielding them from the self-interested hypocrisy that motivates their every public deed.160
“If we would know the world,” Mandeville writes, “we must look into it,” and when Mandeville looks into it, he sees a world shot through with self-interested flattery and hypocrisy, with lies and deception.161 No one would have disagreed. But what we don’t see can be as important as what we do see and, like Nicole, Mandeville does not see charity or anything that could reasonably be thought to be the effects of charity at work in our actions. Nicole still believed in charity but had found himself lost in a world where it had become invisible, untraceable, effectively if not truly irrelevant. Mandeville, by contrast, simply ignores it. The world is the world as he finds it, a world devoid of charity, and this is why Mandeville can give so different an answer to the question that had so long troubled writers in the courtly tradition, the question that so desperately worried John of Salisbury: How should we respond to this morally perplexing world so riven with illusions? Mandeville’s answer is simple: Don’t respond to it, just accept it. We are all both deceivers and easily deceived, full of self-love and thank goodness for that. The mysterious operations of self-interested pride accidentally result in a better social order than any intentional human planning blinded by false notions of charity could ever have hoped to achieve.162
This was hardly the answer Mandeville’s critics wanted to hear. In Remarks on the Fable of the Bees, published in 1724, William Law contended that Mandeville incoherently, not to mention heretically, blurred the difference between truth and lies, good and evil. “Now, the Religion of our Country tells us that God is Truth, and the Devil the Author of Lies. And if I should ask you why one should be worshipp’d rather than the other, I should puzzle your profound philosophy, as much as if I ask’d you which was the finest Flower; for you cannot tell that one of the Beings is really good, and the other really evil, and yet maintain, that there is no real Goodness in Truth, nor any real Evil in Lies and Falsehood.”163 But it was precisely the dream of such straightforward distinctions that Mandeville found lacking in a world in which flattery and deception so often seemed to pave the way to a thriving society. And not just Mandeville. The entire tradition of court writing had recognized the value of lies, whether virtuous, pious, necessary, or expedient. This is what it meant to live east of Eden, in the court, in a fallen world in which moral perplexity and confusion abound.
Lies had always had their place, only now they no longer needed the fig leaf of charity.
CHAPTER FIVE
Women
LESSONS ABOUT LIES
There are liars and there are women, and every woman is a liar.
A difficult lesson learned and unwanted, but impossible to avoid, even behind closed doors in the solitude of one’s own room. This is where Christine de Pizan learns it, after a long day of exhausting study. Tired of working her way through oversize treatises full of subtle and difficult arguments, she scans the shelves that surround her for some light poetry. She reaches up for a book she doesn’t recognize and, discovering it is by Matheolus, smiles. Although she has never read it, she has “often heard that like other books it discusses respect for women.” Before she can begin reading, her mother calls her to supper, and so it is only the next morning, having returned to her study, that she discovers the volume is not at all what she had heard it to be. Full of lies and vicious slanders about women, poorly written and unpleasant, she quickly puts it down in favor of something “more elevated and useful [for] study.”1
Unfortunately, she cannot forget what she has read. Her thoughts keep returning to Matheolus, and not only to him but to all the other men, often learned and respected philosophers, orators, poets—all of whom as if with one voice have filled their books and treatises with “many wicked insults about women and their behavior.” She thinks of herself and her friends, of the princesses, noblewomen, and members of the lower classes with whom she has spoken over the years. Nothing about their lives, neither their actions nor their conversation, supports the vile assertions that these men have written about women, and yet their writings exist. Nearly every moral treatise she has ever read contains at least one, if not several, chapters denigrating women. Under the weight of such revered and accumulated authority, Christine finds herself reduced to tears and despair, doubting herself and accepting what she has read. “And I finally decided,” she writes, “that God formed a vile creature when He made woman, and I wondered how such a worthy artisan could have deigned to make such an abominable work … the vessel as well as the refuge and abode of every evil and vice.” Wishing she could have been born a man, she suddenly detests not only herself but all women, condemning one and all as little else than “monstrosities in nature.”2
Jehan le Fèvre would not have disagreed with Christine’s conclusion, nor would Matthew of Boulogne. Together they were responsible for the poem that precipitates Christine’s plummet into the depths of self-doubt, Matthew as its originator, Jehan as its very creative translator. Matthew composed The Lamentations of Matheolus sometime quite late in the thirteenth century as a warning to his acquaintances “lest they submerge themselves in the burdensome war of wedlock.”3 Claiming the poem to be a sort of autobiography, Matthew describes himself as a once-successful cleric and attorney involved in the ecclesiastical bureaucracies in and around Orléans, successful, that is, until he met, then married, a lovely widow named Perrette. For violating canon law, Matthew lost everything, his status and his wealth, all for the love of a woman whose beauty quickly vanished, leaving behind nothing but an increasingly horrid character with which to torture him the remaining days of his life. Though not widely read, Matthew’s poem fascinated Jehan le Fèvre, “a legal representative, at the royal parliament in Paris.”4 In the 1370s, Jehan translated Matthew’s poem into French, while doubling its length with additional venom, vitriol, and over-the-top misogyny.
As Jehan would have it, and it is his version that Christine most likely read, Matheolus all too soon realizes that Perrette has deceived him. Had he met Medusa, who transforms men into stone, it would not have been as bad as meeting this “most horrible monster.”5 Later, embellishing his theme, he adds that Nature herself, “having embarked on creation, was shocked when she contemplated her mistake and blushed” before the monstrous hermaphrodite that is woman.6 And what makes women most horrendous and insufferable, what makes them most evil and despicable, is that they speak—constantly, self-servingly, seductively, and always dishonestly. Jehan again and again returns to their shrill incessant babble, their mindless chatter, and the lying sophistry with which they connive to make men their perpetually unrewarded servants. Caught in bed beneath her heaving lover, a woman will convince her cuckolded husband that nothing is happening, that he is deluded, dreaming, suffering from melancholy and must publicly apologize for the outlandish charges he has brought against her, his devoted, now suffering, wife.7 Women nag and whine and scheme, they break promises, they contradict and disobey. “Whoever gave them the gift of speech was out of their mind,” Jehan exclaims at one point. “If one dare accuse God, He would not be able to defend Himself against the charge of giving perverse women deadly weapons when He gave them many tongues.”8
Jehan’s was hardly a solitary voice bemoaning man’s entrapment to deceptive woman. The late fourteenth-century anonymous poem The Fifteen Joys of Marriage presents a world in which women are in league against men, in which wives, maids, mothers, and their friends form secret societies plotting and scheming against
their exasperated and never less than befuddled spouses, telling lies to avoid their conjugal duties as they eagerly await late-night or midday rendezvous with their younger and always more virile lovers. When caught, women lie shamelessly, blaming their lovers, their husbands, calling in their mothers and acquaintances, gossips one and all, to help them escape the predicaments of their uncontrollable passions, filling the air with a cacophony of words and more words and every one false but effective, leaving men helpless in their endless echo.9 The author of the anonymous early fourteenth-century French poem The Vices of Women would not have disagreed. “Outwardly she’s well-behaved / but by her nature, she’s depraved,” he writes. “Her words are sugar-clad / To lure a man and drive him mad.”10 Most popular of all was Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose, written in the 1270s, in which he announces, “There is so much vice in woman that no one can recount her perverse ways in rhyme or in verse” before immediately going on to do just that, describing how wives seduce secrets from their husbands using sweet words, fallacious arguments, tears, and exposed breasts.11 Should any woman complain that these depictions of her sex are false, as Christine de Pizan later would when confronted with Jehan le Fèvre’s rhymed misogyny, Jean replies that authority is on his side. “I shall never lie,” he contends, “in anything as long as the worthy men who wrote the old books did not lie. And in my judgment they all agreed when they told about feminine ways.”12 Christine’s despair begins precisely where Jean’s confidence takes root.
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