The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (28 page)

Christine’s condemnation of lying, much like John of Salisbury’s condemnation some 250 years earlier, is decidedly flexible. Prudent behavior cannot consist in blind obedience to general principles, if only because principles in this perplexing world can all too easily come into conflict with other principles. This becomes clear when Christine turns from Prudence’s two overarching principles to seven additional “teachings which, according to Prudence, are necessary to those who wish to live wisely and wish to have honor.” The first of these is that every lady must “love her husband and live in peace with him, or otherwise she will have already discovered the torments of Hell.”
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Easy advice to follow when her husband is devoted to her, but not all husbands are kind, nor faithful. Christine acknowledges these possibilities only to stress that what matters is the woman’s honor and good reputation, and these require that she always maintain a facade of devotion to her husband. Imagine he has strayed into an affair with another woman. If there is nothing the princess can do to end it, Christine writes, “she must put up with all this and dissimulate wisely, pretending that she does not notice it and that she truly does not know anything about it.”
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While Christine says little in this case about how far such dissimulation should go, whether the woman should quietly feign ignorance or go so far as to deny verbally any knowledge of the affair when others ask about it, the justification for such less than forthright behavior is never in doubt—to act otherwise is to risk angering her husband. “He will perhaps leave you,” she writes, “and people will mock you all the more and believe shame and dishonor, and it may be still worse for you.”
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What at first remains implicit soon becomes explicit. In the fourth lesson, Worldly Prudence warns that the envious are everywhere, and the better and more virtuous a person is, the more her enemies gather round to bring her down with their plots and schemes, their murmurings and gossip. Christine, echoing her advice concerning adulterous husbands, recommends that the good lady pretend not to notice these people and to continue to treat
them as friends. Christine’s advice then becomes much more specific. The princess must appear to defer to them and to seek their advice “in confidential meetings (as she will pretend them to be), where she will tell them ordinary things with a great show of secrecy and confidence and keep her real thoughts to herself.”
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If a friend should warn her that these people are out to seek her ruin, she will rebuke the informer and assert that far from being enemies, they are her closest friends. All this must be done with great show and calculation. She will make every effort to appear simple and ignorant of their schemes. “But in spite of all of these things and her great dissimulations,” Christine writes, “she will watch them as carefully as she can and stay on her guard.”
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Throughout
The Book of the Three Virtues
, Christine recommends the deployment of deception, dissimulation, and lies as weapons for warding off the attacks of the envious while simultaneously allowing the princess to maintain the demeanor of a good and honorable lady. It is tempting to read all this with something of a cynical slant and to imagine that Christine is more concerned with the mere appearance of honor and virtue than with their reality. As a result, it might seem that she effectively collapses the distinction between moral worth and a good reputation in such a way that, for all intents and purposes, moral worth is nothing but the possession of a good name, no matter how she achieves and sustains it. The practical nature of
The Book of Three Virtues
adds to this impression. If the princess wishes to win over her husband’s friends and family so that they will protect her from her enemies and come to her aid in difficult times, she must honor and praise them. The evidence of this sort of behavior, Christine writes, “will give still greater proof of the love and loyalty that she has for her husband.”
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To make these actions even more effective, Christine writes at another point, the lady “will want her behavior to be apparent and known to everyone and not at all kept secret.”
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It is only through such words and actions that people develop their opinions about us. “One cannot judge the intention of good people,” Christine notes, “except by their deeds, which if they are good testify to a good person, and vice versa.”
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Whether or not you love
your husband, respect his family, or feel any goodwill toward the poor and those around you in court, pretend that you do, and your place will be secure.

Good deeds serve as witness to a person’s character, but deeds can be faked, intentions hidden. Christine admits as much and advises women to exploit such possibilities when necessary in order to protect themselves and their good name. She even recognizes how difficult this work of self-suppression and concealment can be because it requires the lady “to master and correct [her] own heart and will,” and that “is a thing beyond nature.” She must act against her natural inclinations to be honest. Still, it is worth the trouble because “it is a sign of very great strength and steadfastness of heart, which is one of the most excellent cardinal virtues.”
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Again and again, Christine emphasizes, not simply the practical necessity of this behavior, but also its moral and religious importance. Survival matters, but it is not an end in itself, and Christine tries to restrict the range of acceptable duplicitous behavior through the ties that link the active life with God’s “teachings and admonitions.” The woman who serves God through the active life leads a life of charity, and for the princess this means she must strive to “be the means of peace and concord.”
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Unlike men, who by nature are more courageous and hotheaded, women are more timid and of a sweeter disposition, Christine explains, “and for this reason, if they are wise and if they wish to, they can be the best means of pacifying men.”
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Christine introduces the role of the princess as peacekeeper when discussing how the honorable princess should work to defuse those tensions that can lead to war, but it is clear that it is a more general principle that frames her entire conception of the woman’s social function. The noblewoman, for example, must act as an intermediary between the poor and her husband, winning their trust and, in so doing, curtailing potential riots and civil unrest. Her behavior toward her husband and the envious can likewise be translated into this higher register of creating peace and concord. Both her genuine concern for her husband and, if the situation should arise, feigned ignorance of his sexual dalliances
work to establish domestic peace and a setting in which she can continue to act as a moderating element in his governance of the state. Pretending friendship with the envious does something similar. By refusing to acknowledge their ill will, the princess avoids potential quarrels and arguments, keeps her friends from becoming involved in injurious affairs, and forestalls the possibility that her husband, learning of her enemies, might side with them.
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If people are judged by their external signs, it seems all the clearer that the truest proof of the princess’s honor and good reputation will be in her effect on the state, the fruit of her works of charity, and in her promotion of peace and harmony.
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While the larger goal of civic charity both justifies and sets limits on the noblewoman’s actions, Christine admits her advice poses problems, possibly serious problems. Nowhere is this more clear than when she presents the fifth teaching of Worldly Prudence. The noblewoman must cultivate the goodwill not only of the barons and aristocracy but also of the middle classes and the common people. The friendship and admiration of these people will profit her in a variety of ways. They will include her in their prayers, praise her in their sermons and, if the need arise, “their voices and words can be a shield and defense against the rumors and reports of her slanderous enemies and can negate them.”
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To gain their favor, the lady should socialize and meet amiably with intelligent and influential members of the clergy. Whenever possible, she should make sure that her acts of charity and almsgiving are made public and recorded “in perpetual memory on tablets in their churches so that the people will pray to God for her.”
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A thin, perhaps vanishing line separates these recommendations from sheer hypocrisy. A hypocrite, according to long-accepted definition, is a person who makes excessive show “through genuflections and prayers” of virtues they lack. The hypocrite is more concerned with how others perceive her, with the public acclaim and belief in her virtue, than with actually being virtuous.
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Christine acknowledges how perilously close her advice comes to advocating hypocrisy and that she may, in fact, actually be endorsing it. “It may seem,” Christine writes, “that she has a small streak of
hypocrisy or that she is getting a name for it, yet it may be called a ‘just hypocrisy,’ for it strives towards the good and the avoidance of evil.”
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There is danger here because the very actions needed to secure her reputation and good name are the same sorts of actions that can undo all she has achieved. It doesn’t take much for “just hypocrisy” to look like hypocrisy plain and simple. “We repeat,” Christine concludes, “that this kind of ‘just hypocrisy’ is almost necessary, especially to princes and princesses who must rule over others and to whom more reverence is due than to other people.”
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Lies will always be lies, but for Christine, as for John, in this fallen world context and circumstance can render them virtuous, praiseworthy, and pleasing to God.

F
ROM
L
IES TO
C
IVILITY

With their advocacy of the well-timed lie, the pious fraud, and just hypocrisy, both John of Salisbury and Christine de Pizan completed the intellectual journey from uncertainty to probability to deception that so many early modern thinkers would make. What they discovered is remarkably similar. John and Christine, not to mention Peter Damian, Peter of Blois, and Alain Chartier, all stress the epistemological dangers of the court, how it overflows with liars and deceivers, spewing verbal illusions that make it all too easy for the courtier to lower his guard as he eases into a life of indolence and for the noblewoman to expect the fulfillment of her every passing whim. In both cases, they mistake the false for the true, the illusion for reality. These mistakes matter. Identifying themselves with what appears, they dress themselves in the garb of truth’s simulacrum and become someone else, someone they are not, debased, degraded, endangered. If courtly life is a struggle waged on the battlefield of our fallen world, as John of Salisbury would have it, then it is a struggle in which the possibility of deception must always already be assumed, and this assumption profoundly shapes how we must think about ourselves and others. Constantly on guard against his peers’ countless plots and schemes, the courtier cannot help but be aware that menacing and unknown
secrets may well lie veiled behind smiling faces. By the same token, how can he not be aware of his own secrets, the difference between his unspoken intentions and his outward appearance, as he assumes misleading and false gestures to mask his goals from those around him? Deception becomes the only remedy against deception. John explicitly signals this distinction between surface and depth, appearance and reality, not to mention the need to exploit it in one’s own self-defense, in the Platonic analogy with which he begins and frames the
Policraticus
. Just as the soul must be separated from the body, so must the man of eminence keep his distance from the world and its seductive temptations.

To many amused early modern observers, courtiers were more than happy to erase the line between appearance and reality in their eager rush toward self-interested sycophancy and flattery. In his 1547 satire of court life,
The Philosopher of the Court
, Philibert de Vienne gleefully contrasts the philosophers of old with the newest crop of courtiers. Unlike philosophers who, in the manner of the Stoics, believe that they must search out secrets hidden deep in the nature of things and invisible to the eye, courtiers attend only to surfaces, “to little civilities and good facades.”
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While ancient philosophers stressed that if we follow nature and the dictates of natural reason we can avoid doing evil, the courtier seeks only to do what is seemly and decorous.
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Indeed, Philibert claims that to be prudent simply means to be seemly, to be able to do what needs to be done, like playing the lute, the guitar, the harp or the harpsichord, the violin or the lyre, or knowing any of a dozen styles of dance.
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Should we master the expectations and etiquette of courtly life, all our actions will be “honest and virtuous and we will be judged to be wise, prudent and full of knowledge.” For virtue, Philibert announces, is nothing other than “to live after the manner of court.” What is the practical consequence of the courtier’s philosophy? In language that could have been lifted directly from the pages of Peter Damian and Alain Chartier, Philibert writes, “The gentleman courtier is not subject to himself; if it is necessary to laugh, he laughs, if it is necessary to grieve, he cries, if it is necessary to eat, he eats and if it is necessary to fast, he fasts.”
He will, in short, do whatever is necessary to please his company, even if it goes against his own desires. Without the teachings of this philosophy, Philibert assures his readers, a person will not be able to fool and deceive even the simplest of minds.
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Philibert’s satire hit close enough to home that at least some of his readers, including his English translator, mistook it for a serious guide to courtly life and success.
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Their mistake is easy enough to forgive, since the real things were ever quick to stress the importance of conforming oneself to others. In
The Refin’d Courtier
, his self-described English “paraphrase” of Giovanni della Casa’s immensely popular 1558 treatise
Galateo: Or, the Rules of Polite Behavior
, Nathaniel Walker emphasizes that a man must know how to manage his life so that “in his
familiar
intercourse with others, he may gain a reputation of a
neat
, and an
amiable
, and a
well-manner’d
person; which truly is either really a virtue, or else for its resemblance very near of kin to it.”
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To these ends, Walker advises his readers that it is “meet whatsoever you are, to frame and compose your self and actions, not according to your
own private
Will and Fancy, but according to the prescriptions and Garbs of
those
among whom it is your lot to live.” Perceiving the satirical excesses to which such counsel might lead, he cautions, “Not that you are
entirely
to resign your Freedom to the imperious dictates of other men, but that, by no means affecting Singularity, you should yield a ready Compliance in all things which are
indifferent
, still retaining a due respect to your own native right and Liberty.” It is a matter of learning how to “demean ourselves acceptably” before our superiors, without appearing willing “to lick the very spittle from under their feet.”
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