The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment by Dallas G. Denery II

The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment by Dallas G. Denery II

Author:Dallas G. Denery II [Denery II, Dallas G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2015-01-18T05:00:00+00:00


FROM LIES TO CIVILITY

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.”108 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.109 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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