The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (25 page)

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.
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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?”
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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.

E
ARLY
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ODERN
U
NCERTAINTY AND
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ECEPTION

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 constant 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.”
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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.

But it is an important question for another reason as well, a reason having to do with how historians think about the development of European society. For many historians, the response to illusion, deception, and uncertainty functions as a central
explanatory device in popular and enduring accounts of Europe’s transition from a medieval or premodern society to an early modern one. According to these varied interpretations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the origins of European modernity depend in large part on how people reacted to the specter of uncertainty and skepticism, the result of a widespread crisis of confidence in which long-held religious, cultural, and scientific institutions and beliefs had become unstable, even untenable.
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Members of the early modern court were hardly immune to these pressures, and scholars have long wondered about the rather cheerful tone of Castiglione’s great work, even as his characters discuss the ominous consequences of life in the newly emerging absolutist states. It is in the court that the epistemological and ethical crises in early modern Europe came together most dramatically.
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One particularly useful way into this enormous historiographic debate focuses on two distinct types of response to uncertainty: those that privilege the theoretical intellect and those that privilege the practical intellect.
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Descartes offers an example of the first approach when he famously addresses the problem of uncertainty in his
Discourse on Method
. Describing his time spent at one of Europe’s most esteemed colleges, Descartes informs us that the upshot of his education was the disheartening discovery that there is practically nothing upon which everyone agrees. Every authority has its detractors and every theory its objectors.
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In the
Meditations on First Philosophy
, Descartes would radicalize this uncertainty through a series of thought experiments culminating in his invention of a “malicious demon of utmost power and cunning” whose sole purpose is to deceive us about all things, all the time. Descartes responds to the threat of global uncertainty with a drastic limitation or restriction concerning what qualifies as knowledge. He will accept as true only those opinions that are indubitable, necessarily true, and incapable of being false. Certainty, Descartes argues, is the only feasible response to uncertainty.
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While this approach may well have proved useful for the natural philosopher, it was hardly practical for anyone else, even that same natural philosopher in daily life, where certainty can rarely, if
ever, be had. The second response to early modern uncertainty, an approach that privileged the practical intellect and the faculty of prudence, addressed precisely these more immediately pressing concerns. Accepting uncertainty as an unavoidable feature of our lives, any number of early modern writers and thinkers turned to rhetoric and dialectic as a means of making sense of themselves and their actions in the world.
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In a series of lectures from the 1570s on Aristotle’s
Rhetoric
, the Oxford scholar John Rainolds argues that we must reject the Aristotelian notion of scientific demonstration based on first principles because we possess few, if any, real first principles. Proponents of Aristotle, Rainolds writes, “wish a demonstrative proof to be understood with reference to nature, not to us.” The problem, Rainolds contends, is one of perspective. By demanding that knowledge must begin with necessary first principles, Aristotelians fail to consider the real limitations that frame and condition our attempts to know the world. “Being men with wits enslaved to error,” Rainolds argues, “we scarcely know what might be ‘first principles,’ ‘unmediated terms,’ and ‘necessary propositions’ for ourselves, much less for nature.” The evidence of our confusion is everywhere, he adds: just look at the disagreements among the Skeptics, the Epicureans, and the Pythagoreans.
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For Rainolds, dialectics replaces demonstration precisely because the rules and tools of rhetoric provide the individual with a means for evaluating and selecting among the competing choices that confront us in our lives. “Rhetoric,” Rainolds reminds his readers, “does not create probabilities, but instead perceives them.”
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Rhetoric may have provided the analytic and interpretive tools, but it was prudence, the practical intellect, that put those tools to use. Rainolds argues that prudence can apply dialectical techniques to practically any question, and even the most summary review of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature reveals that he was not alone in this belief. The French skeptic Pierre Charron argues that prudence “is a general guide and conduct of the other virtues, and of our whole life … in a word, the art of our life, as physic the art of our health.”
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A good thing this is, too, as
our uncertainty about things extends far beyond the confines of natural philosophy. “[O]bserve how all mankind are made up of falsehood and deceit, of tricks and lies,” Charron writes in his most famous work,
Of Wisdom
, “how unfaithful and dangerous, how full of disguise and design all conversation is at present become, but especially, how much more it abounds near [the prince], and how manifestly hypocrisy and dissimulation are the reigning qualities of princes’ courts.” Given “the great uncertainty and inconstancy of human affairs,” the fickleness of human nature, and “the inexpressible variety of accidents, circumstances, appurtenances, dependencies and consequences, the difference of times and places and persons” that constantly surround and confront us, there can be few hard-and-fast rules to guide our conduct, few principles on which we can always rely.
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In such circumstances, demonstration gives way to dialectic, and it is left to prudence, Charron contends, to determine when we ought to follow “established laws and customs in common use” and when we will be “obliged to go off the beaten road, and have recourse to difficult stratagems and unusual methods.”
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In
The Book of the Courtier
, Castiglione would offer similar advice for similar reasons. Modeling his own dialogue on Cicero’s skeptically tinged treatise
The Orator
, Castiglione leads his characters through a series of conversations that, in true rhetorical fashion, consider every question from both sides, generating doubt and a general distrust of first principles and dogmatic positions. Before embarking on his depiction of the ideal courtier, one of those characters, Count Ludovico, warns that “to recognize true perfection in anything is so difficult as to be scarcely possible; and this is because the way of opinions vary.”
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When it comes to questions of aesthetics, morals and ethics, not only do different people prefer different things, but even each change of circumstance requires its own unique response. During the second evening of discussion among the guests at the Court of Urbino another character, Federico, advises that “in everything he does or says” the perfect courtier should follow “certain general rules.” Before speaking or acting, the courtier should match his words and deeds to the
ever-changing demands of the moment. If he hopes to succeed, “he should consider well what he does or says, the place where he does it, in whose presence, its timing, why he is doing it, his own age, his profession, the end he is aiming at, and the means that are suitable.”
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Only through these careful dialectical and prudential calculations will the courtier be able to act in the most pleasing, the most useful, and most beneficial manner.

Beneficial for whom? The importance of early modern Europe’s alleged rhetorical turn, historians contend, depends on how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers answered this question. Machiavelli’s response is, no doubt, the most infamous, but he is really only the very representative tip of the proverbial iceberg. Machiavelli’s valorization of a prudential politics is but one example of an alleged separation of prudence from not only its traditional religious but even its ethical moorings.
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Confronted with the vagaries of fortune and a dangerous populace (“Men,” Machiavelli famously notes, “are ungrateful, fickle simulators and deceivers, avoiders of dangers, greedy for gain”
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), the prince must act in his own self-interest, and this might require dissimulation, hypocrisy, and lies. Life in the court was no different, and behind the urbane conversations of Castiglione’s noble men and women is a constant awareness that the court is a dangerous place, full of intrigue, deception, and self-serving sycophants ceaselessly seeking their own success at another’s expense. In this atmosphere, prudence becomes a tool of self-defense and self-interest, demarcating ever more clearly the courtier from his surroundings, his inner thoughts and intentions from his outward performance. Dissimulating one’s thoughts, parrying dangerous and intrusive questions with ambiguous or witty responses, is the stock-in-trade of the successful courtier. In
The Book of the Courtier
, Gaspare Pallavicino fears that Federico reduces the courtier to a liar. Federico does little to dispel these concerns, adding that “even if it is deception it is not to be censured.”
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From uncertainty to probability and from prudence to deception, historians trace a path that severs early modern Europe from its medieval past, leading us forward into a modernity that
privileges the interior over the exterior, the individual over the community, utility over truth. Unfortunately, neither the path nor the destination were entirely new. Medieval writers knew all too well the perils of the court and how to respond to them. What changed between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries, between John of Salisbury and Castiglione, between Pierre Charron and Bernard Mandeville, was not the recognition that sometimes we must lie but rather the role that lies play in human society.

U
NCERTAINTY AND
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KEPTICISM IN THE
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EDIEVAL
C
OURT

In
The Treasure of the City of Ladies
, an early fourteenth-century handbook for women at court, Christine de Pizan considers the daily dangers that face the princess or noblewoman. Christine asks her readers to imagine the noble lady glorying in her position and possessions as she awakes in the morning wrapped in her luxurious bedding, in her well-appointed room, surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting. Temptation, always ready to seduce, whispers in her ear, “By Almighty God, is there in this world a greater lady than you or one with more authority?” Her vanity and pride begin to swell and soon, forgetful of who she is and how she should behave, she comes to believe there is nothing she does not require, no pleasure she should not satisfy. Temptation encourages her with more baseless compliments: “It’s no more than your deserve.”
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