The Swerve (22 page)

“Poggio,” who represents himself as a character in the dialogue, argues that hypocrisy is better at least than open violence, but his friend Aliotti, an abbot, responds that it is worse, since everyone can perceive the horror of a confessed rapist or murderer, but it is more difficult to defend oneself against a sly deceiver. How is it possible then to identify hypocrites? After all, if they are good at their simulations, it is very difficult to distinguish the frauds from genuinely holy figures. The dialogue lists the warning signs. You should be suspicious of anyone who

Virtually any priest or monk who is at the curia is a hypocrite, writes Poggio, for it is impossible to fulfill the highest purposes of religion there. And if you happen at the curia to see someone who is particularly abject in his humility, beware: he is not merely a hypocrite but the worst hypocrite of all. In general, you should be wary of people who seem too perfect, and remember that it is actually quite difficult to be good: “Difficile est bonum esse.”

Against the Hypocrites
is a work written not in the wake of Martin Luther by a Reformation polemicist but a century earlier, by a papal bureaucrat living and working at the center of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. It indicates that the Church, though it could and did respond violently to what it perceived as doctrinal or institutional challenges, was willing to tolerate extremely sharp critiques from within, including critiques from secular figures like Poggio. And it indicates too that Poggio and his fellow humanists in the curia struggled to channel their anger and disgust into more than obscene laughter and violent quarrels with one another.

The greatest and most consequential work in this critical spirit was written by Poggio’s bitter enemy, Lorenzo Valla. Valla famously used his brilliant command of Latin philology to demonstrate that the “Donation of Constantine,” the document in which the Roman emperor purportedly gave possession of the Western Empire to the pope, was a forgery. After the publication of this piece of detective work, Valla was in considerable danger. But the Church’s tolerance for internal critique extended, at least for a brief period in the fifteenth century,
even
to this extreme edge: the humanist pope Nicholas V eventually appointed Valla to the post of apostolic secretary, and thus this most independent and critical of spirits was, like Poggio, employed by the curia he had so relentlessly exposed and ridiculed.

Poggio lacked Valla’s radicalism and originality. One of the speakers in
Against the Hypocrites
briefly floats an argument that might have led in a perilous direction, moving from the theatrical pretense of holiness in the Catholic Church to the fraudulent use of oracles in pagan religion as a means to overawe and manipulate the vulgar. But the subversive link—which Machiavelli would exploit to shocking effect in the next century in constructing a disenchanted analysis of the political uses of all religious faith—is never quite made, and Poggio’s work merely ends with a fantasy of stripping the hypocrites of their protective cloaks. In the afterlife, we are told, the dead, in order to enter the infernal kingdom, have to pass through gates of different diameters. Those who are known by the custodian to be clearly bad or good pass through the wide gates; through the narrow ones go those about whom it is not clear whether they are honest or hypocritical. The honest souls pass through, with only minimal scratching; the hypocrites have their skin entirely lacerated.

This fantasy of laceration manages to combine Poggio’s aggression and his pessimism: the hypocrites will all be exposed and definitively punished, but it is not until the afterlife that it is possible even to reveal who they are. If anger always hovers within him just beneath the surface of his laughter, so too despair—at the impossibility of reforming abuses, at the steady loss of everything worth treasuring, at the wretchedness of the human condition—hovers just beneath his anger.

Like many of his colleagues, Poggio was an indefatigable letter writer, and through these letters we glimpse him grappling with the cynicism, disgust, and worldweariness that seems
to
have afflicted everyone in the papal entourage. Monasteries, he writes to a friend, are “not congregations
²³
of the faithful or places of religious men but the workshops of criminals”; the curia is “a sink of men’s vices.” (158) Everywhere he looks around Rome, people are tearing down ancient temples to get the lime from the stones, and within a generation or two most of the glorious remains of the past, so much more precious than our own miserable present, will be gone. He is wasting his life and must find an escape route: “I must try everything,
²⁴
so that I may achieve something, and so stop being a servant to men and have time for literature.”

Yet though he indulged at moments in fantasies of changing his life—“to abandon
²⁵
all these worldly concerns, all the empty cares, annoyances, and daily plans, and to flee into the haven of poverty, which is freedom and true quiet and safety”—Poggio recognized sadly that such a route was not open to him. “I do not know
²⁶
what I can do outside the Curia,” he wrote to Niccoli, “except teach boys or work for some master or rather tyrant. If I had to take up either one of these, I should think it utter misery. For not only is all servitude a dismal thing, as you know, but especially so is serving the lusts of a wicked man. As for school teaching, may I be spared that! For it would be better to be subject to one man than to many.” He would stay at the curia, then, in the hope that he would make enough money to enable him to retire early: “My one ambition:
²⁷
by the hard work of a few years to achieve leisure for the rest of my life.” As it turned out, the “few years” would prove to be fifty.

The pattern of dreaming and deferral and compromise is an altogether familiar one: it is the epitome of a failed life. But Poggio did not succumb to it, though he had every reason to do so. He lived in a world not only pervaded by corruption and greed but also repeatedly battered by conspiracies, riots, wars, and outbreaks of plague. He worked in the Roman curia, but the curia was not even stable in its location in Rome, since the
pope
and his entire court repeatedly were forced to flee the city. He grappled, as everyone in his world had to grapple, with the constant presence of pain—from which there was no medical relief—and with the constant threat of death. He could easily have contracted into brittle, defensive cynicism, relieved only by unfulfilled fantasies of escape.

What saved him was an obsessive craving, his book mania.

In 1406, when he learned that his great mentor Salutati had died, Poggio was grief-stricken. The great old man had seized upon anyone in whom he had seen “some gleam of intellect”
²⁸
and had helped those whom he had so identified with instruction, guidance, letters of recommendation, money, and, above all, the use of his own books. “We have lost a father,” he wrote; “we have lost the haven and refuge of all scholars, the light of our nation.” Poggio claimed that he was weeping as he wrote his letter, and there is no reason to doubt the genuineness of his words: “Express my sympathy to his sons,” he wrote to Niccoli in Florence, “and tell them that I am plunged in grief. This too I want to find out from you: what you think will happen to his books.”

“I was upset and terrified,”
²⁹
Poggio wrote Niccoli in July 1449, “by the death of Bartolomeo de Montepulciano,” the close friend with whom he had explored the monastic libraries of Switzerland. But a moment later his mind shifts to what he had just discovered at Monte Cassino: “I found a book
³⁰
containing Julius Frontinus’
De aquaeductu urbis
.” And in a letter written a week later, the same pattern recurs. He begins by mentioning two ancient manuscripts that he has copied and that he wishes, he notes, “to be ruled in red
³¹
and bound.”

I could not write you this from the City on account of my grief over the death of my dearest friend and on account of my confusion of spirit, deriving partly from
fear
and partly from the sudden departure of the Pope. I had to leave my house and settle all my things; a great deal had to be done at once so that there was no opportunity for writing or even for drawing breath. There was besides the greatest grief, which made everything else much harder. But to go back to the books.

“But to go back to the books …” This is the way out, the escape from the pervasive fear and bafflement and pain. “My country has not yet
³²
recovered from the plague which troubled it five years ago,” he writes in September, 1430; “Now again it seems that it will succumb to a massacre equally violent.” And then a moment later: “But let us get back to our own affairs. I see what you write about the library.” If it is not plague that threatens, it is war: “Every man waits his destined hour; even the cities are doomed to their fate.” And then the same note: “Let us spend
³³
our leisure with our books, which will take our minds off these troubles, and will teach us to despise what many people desire.” In the north the powerful Visconti of Milan are raising an army; Florentine mercenaries are besieging Lucca; Alfonso in Naples is stirring up trouble, and the emperor Sigismond is applying intolerable pressure on the pope. “I have already decided
³⁴
what I shall do even if things turn out as many people fear; namely, that I shall devote myself to Greek literature….”

Poggio was highly self-conscious about these letters, and expected them to circulate, but his book mania, expressed again and again, seems unguarded, candid, and authentic. It was the key to a feeling he characterized with a word that otherwise seems singularly inappropriate to a papal bureaucrat: freedom. “Your Poggio,”
³⁵
he wrote, “is content with very little and you shall see this for yourself; sometimes I am free for reading, free from all care about public affairs which I leave to my superiors. I live free as much as I can.” Freedom here has
nothing
to do with political liberty or a notion of rights or the license to say whatever he wished or the ability to go wherever he chose. It is rather the experience of withdrawing inwardly from the press of the world—in which he himself was so ambitiously engaged—and ensphering himself in a space apart. For Poggio, that experience was what it meant to immerse himself in an ancient book: “I am free for reading.”

Poggio savored the feeling of freedom at those times when the usual Italian political disorder became particularly acute or when the papal court was in an uproar or when his own personal ambitions were thwarted or, perhaps equally threatening, when those ambitions were realized. Hence it was a feeling to which he must have clung with particular intensity when sometime after 1410,
³⁶
having amply displayed his gifts as a humanist scribe, a learned writer, and a court insider, he accepted the most prestigious and most dangerous appointment of his career: the post of apostolic secretary to the sinister, sly, and ruthless Baldassare Cossa, who had been elected pope.