The Rose and Geryon: The Poetics of Fraud and Violence in Jean de Meun and Dante

1. The Verbal Sin as a Cultural Construct

ONE  TheVerbalSinasaCulturalConstruct Sin, then, is any transgression in deed, or word, or desire, of the eternal law. {St. Augustine, Against Faustus 22.27} The notion of an indissoluble relationship between language and divinity is as ancient as the Old Testament, according to which the universe began as a response to God’s verbal command. Language thus was as miraculous as Creation itself. The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation further elaborated this idea and posited the notion of Christ as the embodied Word. Since ordinary humans were endowed with the gift of speech as well, for Christians human language became the most direct connection between the secular world, corrupt and corruptible, and the transcendental world, perfect and eternal. As early as the fourth century AD, Augustine of Hippo , the first philosopher of Christianity, wrote at length on the specular relationship between human words and the Word—verbum Dei—and drew attention to a major split within language. According to St. Augustine , people use two different types of speech: an outer one, consisting of the vocal expression of concepts and ideas, and an inner one—verbum cordis (or mentis), “the word of the heart” (or “of the mind”), which is the 15 16    The Verbal Sin true language reflecting God’s Word (On the Trinity, Book 15).1 In moral terms, the closer people’s outer words are to their inner, mental words, the closer people are to transcendental standards of speech. When there is a discrepancy between what one says and what one actually thinks, human communication becomes tarnished with the sins of lying and double talk. Augustine’s doctrine of interiority, his philosophy of language, as well as his ethical concepts, represented a fundamental cultural legacy for medieval Christians, who paid particular attention to the sins committed through the medium of speech. Combining major Augustinian themes with other strands of thought (classical or patristic), medieval thinkers enriched the debate on verbal sin with their own speculative and moral insights. The first sign of this increased sensitivity to the dangerous potential of spoken words appeared at the dawn of the twelfth century in the works of the influential writer Hugh of St. Victor. As a Parisian master in theology operating at the Augustinian monastery of St. Victor, Hugh concentrated his religious efforts on the elaboration of a moral reform designed to help the “outer man” (an Augustinian concept) reach a state of perfection close to divine bliss. This state of felicity could be reached only by way of a rigorously disciplined behavior, including gestures, attitudes, and use of language . This whole complex of behavioral attitudes belonged to the scientia recte vivendi (“art of proper living”), which Hugh elaborated in De institutione novitiorum (On the instruction of novices), a moral tract written before 1125 and designed for aspiring monks. In Hugh’s view, speech ought not to be a spontaneous and arbitrary flow of words but a phenomenon controllable by means of knowledge and method. In order to shape all human utterances, a specific science provided norms for disciplined speech. More specifically, Hugh’s notion of disciplina in locutione involved the observance of a set of rules meant to regulate the production of words, a set that he borrowed from classical rhetoric and reworked in a Christian context . These rules gravitated around the six factors a speaker had to consider before uttering words: in what capacity he was speaking, what he had to say, to whom, how, when, and where. Such factors, which in pagan rhetoric had been the parameters for forging a convincing political/public argu1 . For an analysis of Augustine’s theory of inner speech, see Claude Panaccio, “Augustin, le verbe mental e l’amour,” in Les philosophies morales et politiques au Moyen Âge: Proceedings of the 9th International Congress of Medieval Philosophy, edited by B. Carlos Bazán et al. (New York: Legas, 1995), 777–85. The Verbal Sin    17 mentation, became norms tailored for the virtuous speech of Christians. Each of these circumstances enabled a pious individual to achieve discretio loquendi, “discernment/prudence in speaking.” The language user who failed to observe these linguistic-moral norms was an “indiscreet” (i.e., imprudent ) speaker, and the tongue with which he uttered the indiscriminate words, a lingua indisciplinata. Thus, Hugh’s contribution to the medieval ethics of eloquence is also remarkable for the creation of a metalinguistic vocabulary, that is, of a lexicon employed to describe the workings...