The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (26 page)

Christine undoubtedly understood the seductions of court life. Having grown up in and around the court of Charles V of France, first as the daughter of the king’s physician, later as the wife of one of his courtiers, she would have witnessed, perhaps even experienced, them. In Christine’s writings the court teems with danger, and the unwary noblewoman, filled with false and illusory promises of power, riches, and comfort, can all too easily plunge headlong into her own undoing. John of Salisbury had warned of precisely the same dangers in the
Policraticus
when he invoked his decidedly Platonic analogy to describe the courtier’s relationship to the court. Just as the soul can all too easily lose itself to bodily
sensations and “by a sort of self-betrayal go astray as the result of its desires amid the deceptions of the outer world,” so too can the unwary courtier lose himself amidst the false delights of the court. Forgetful of his own interests and nature, he chases hungrily after tantalizing diversions and base pleasures, degrading himself so that man, who was made in the image of the Creator, “is transformed into a beast by a sort of similarity of character.”
³⁵

Christine may well have read John’s treatise, either in the original Latin or in the French translation that Charles V had requested from Denis Foulechat in the 1370s.
³⁶
In any event, they speak with one voice when it comes to diagnosing and responding to the nature of court life. Both Christine and John describe the court as a place of deception in which the illusion of truth stands in for the truth itself, and at the heart of these illusions are the flatterers in all their treacherous variety. Whereas Plato stressed the dangers of sensation and warned his followers against those insidious pleasures and pains “that rivet the soul to the body and … weld them together,”
³⁷
John stresses the dangers of language, of false words and feigned gestures. “One who is called flatterer in the strict sense of the word,” John explains, “is he who whitewashes another’s fault, and, that the latter may not see himself, spreads before the eyes of his victim a cloud, as it were, of vanity and fills his ears with encomiums.”
³⁸
Christine, likewise, warns her readers against accepting anyone at face value. “There is not the least doubt,” she writes, “that according to the way of the world and the movements of fortune, there is no prince so grand in this world, however just he may be, nor was there ever a lord or lady or any other man or woman who was loved by everyone.”
³⁹
Even Jesus had socalled friends plotting his arrest and crucifixion, and the noble woman must never forget that behind even the kindest words and most innocuous asides there can lurk dishonesty and treachery, false counsel and pointed gossip.

Confronted with the ever-present threat of deception, both John and Christine counsel their readers to approach the court with a carefully cultivated caution and suspicion. While Christine simply assumes this approach throughout the
Treasure
, John
elaborates its philosophical underpinning and justification when, in the prologue to the
Policraticus
, he proclaims his allegiance to the ancient Academic skeptics.
⁴⁰
In a slightly earlier treatise, the
Metalogicon
, John aligns himself with a form of ancient Academic skepticism whose followers “do not precipitate an opinion concerning those questions that are doubtful to a wise man.”
⁴¹
John associates this type of skepticism with Socrates’s pupil Antisthenes, who distinguished between self-evident things and things known through experience. While we can know the former, our knowledge of the latter is never so secure. What we know through experience, what usually happens, John cautions, need not always happen. About these sorts of things, things that are credible if not certain, Antisthenes advised moderation in judgment and speech. We should restrain and qualify our words, adding phrases like “I believe” or “I think.”
⁴²
In the
Policraticus
, John refers to this sort of knowledge in terms of probability. “In philosophy,” he writes, “accepting as I do the Academic system, I have admitted that which seems to the best of my judgment likely or probable.” John claims that both Cicero and Augustine had ascribed to this cautious approach to human knowledge, recognizing that while there are some questions we cannot doubt, “no one speaks with greater safety who is circumspect in language just to guard himself from falling into error.”
⁴³

Skepticism reveals apparent certainties to be mere probabilities. Probability, John explains in the
Metalogicon
, is one of the three branches of logic, “the science of argumentative reasoning.”
⁴⁴
Unlike demonstrative logic, which focuses on principles and “rejoices in necessity,” and sophistry, whose “only objective is to lose its adversary in a fog of delusions,” probable logic concerns itself with “propositions which, to all or to many men, or at least to the wise, seem to be valid.”
⁴⁵
Probable logic itself consists of two parts, dialectic and rhetoric. The difference between dialectic and rhetoric is one of focus and, perhaps, purpose.
⁴⁶
Dialectic investigates and seeks answers to questions of a general nature. John offers an example drawn from the field of moral philosophy: “Is it better to obey one’s parents or the laws when they disagree?” Unlike logical
demonstrations, which begin with necessary first principles, the dialectical proof will begin with propositions or “theses” that themselves “are well known to all, or to the leaders in each field.”
⁴⁷
A dialectical proposition is probable if it “holds true in several cases,” if it can counter most, even if not all, objections. By contrast, rhetoric analyzes particular cases. The orator will construct a persuasive speech based on hypotheses that derive from the circumstances. “Such circumstances,” John adds, citing Boethius’s
Topics
, “are: ‘Who, what, where, by what means, why, how and when.’ ”
⁴⁸

We need the methods of dialectical and rhetorical analysis, John argues, because our knowledge of the world is limited, imperfect, sometimes confused, and too often wrong. Late in the
Metalogicon
, John serves up a list of impediments to human understanding that includes our invincible ignorance concerning the truths of faith, the frailty of the human condition, and the brevity of our lives. As serious as these obstacles are, none is more pernicious than sin, which “separates us from God, and bars us from the fountain of truth.”
⁴⁹
John’s emphasis on the connection between sin and human ignorance places his entire discussion of skepticism in a decidedly theological framework. By the same token, it also allows John to conceive of sin, in its root causes at least, almost entirely in epistemological terms. We sin when we pursue idle and useless knowledge and claim to know with certainty things that lie beyond our understanding. Curiosity is a sin, John warns, and those pagan philosophers who occupied themselves with investigating the “hidden causes” of things became vain through their own fault. John repeats these warnings in the
Policraticus
, again citing the example of the pagan philosophers who “reared on high the structure … of their own genius in a war against heaven” only to find themselves unknowingly barred from truth.
⁵⁰
Curiosity itself, however, is really more symptom than cause of our broken human condition. The pagan philosophers pursued their investigations beyond proper bounds because they forgot who and what they were. Having become mysteries to themselves, they thought they were wise when in fact they were fools. “When the mind is over-occupied with numerous questions
that do not greatly concern it,” John writes, “it wanders far afield from itself, and often becomes oblivious of itself and no error can be more pernicious than this.”
⁵¹

And so it is that John’s skepticism returns him to the court with its flatterers and tempters, with its amnesiac courtiers and noblewomen forgetful of themselves, their stations, and their duties as they chase after false goods and fleeting pleasures. “Returns” may even be the wrong term. John’s discussion of skepticism, demonstration, and dialectic never left the court. While John’s stated purpose in the
Metalogicon
is to defend the traditional educational program of the liberal arts from a new breed of critic, he is quick to remind his readers that these critics are none other than his peers and opponents. “Utterly at a loss to evade the snapping teeth of my fellow members of the court,” John contends that he had no choice but to respond to them in writing.
⁵²
But John is defending more than a pedagogy and style of learning. He is defending his position at court. In the hothouse of the court, pedagogical attacks become personal attacks, and the personal is always already political. “Being respectful of all and injuring no one,” John laments, “used, of yore, to assure one of popularity.” Clearly the old ways have been forgotten, and with his status at court in question, John has no choice but to strike back against his enemies’ daily carping.

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

E
NTANGLED IN
L
EVIATHAN’S
L
OINS

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