Invective

In the car on my way to the Cloverleaf to my weekly Old-Guy Lunch, I was listening to the Archangel recording of Shakespeare’s King Lear and heard the Earl of Kent’s onslaught on Oswald, the smarmy steward of evil daughter Goneril:

          KENT: Fellow, I know thee

          OSWALD: What dost thou know me for?

          KENT: 
          A knave;
          A rascal; 
          An eater of broken meats; 
          A base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,hundred-pound, filthy, 
          worsted-stocking knave; 
          A lily-livered, action-taking knave,
          A whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue;
          A one-trunk-inheriting slave; 
          One that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but 
          the composition of a
                                                  Knave, 
                                                  Beggar, 
                                                  Coward,
                                                  Pandar,
                                                  And the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: 
          One whom I will beat into clamorous whining, 
          If thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.

How times have changed! You will recall that back in 2019 I offended the mighty She Rates Dogs website and outraged the leadership of Indiana University. The Dean of my business school, the gentle Idalene, said to me that I’d single-handedly ruined all her efforts to make the Kelley School of Business politically pure (which I actually took as a compliment), but the only invectives she could summon up were

Harmful, reprehensible, intolerant, disrespectful, biased, sexist, homophobic, racist, biased, hurtful, threatening, unfair, closed-minded, and non-inclusive.¹

The Provost, Lauren, had a bit more imagination, perhaps because she was a law professor, but she still didn’t really know how to use words as Shakespeare’s Duke of Kent did. She said I was

Racist, sexist, homophobic, pernicious, false, bigoted, stunningly ignorant, more consistent with someone who lived in the 18th century than the 21st, bigoted, unchristian, slur-using, judgmental, vile, stupid, biased, infected, reprehensible, disgusting, wrong, and immoral.²

Phew. What “tigers’ hearts wrapped in sweet women’s hides” are our modern queens!³ But they are not more articulate than tigers are. It’s uncomfortable when your provost calls you stupid, even if it’s a provost noticeably lacking in intellectual heft. . Notice the comparative restraint of my dean, who at least could get herself cited in the business management literature. But neither of them matches up to the Earl of Kent. Lauren and Idie’s invective can chill free speech at Indiana University, but it’s only by fear of power, not fear of the withering put-down. When a Dean says “You’re a poo-poo,” the professor jumps; once retired, the Dean’s poo-poo is just poo-poo and the professors no longer listen.

Of course it’s hard to be Shakespearean, but modern invective isn’t even Lutheran. Luther was famous as a scholar of Hebrew and theology, but famous also for his use of invective. As quoted by Sir Thomas More, Luther said of More’s king, Henry VIII, who had dared to write a theological treatise against him:

But this god, growing shockingly arrogant in his new divinity and certain that whatever he has said ought to happen or has happened, goes further and explicitly testifies that he wishes to dismiss my fundamental principle, leaving it for others to attack, and to overthrow only the superstructure; that is, to fight with straw and hay against the rock of God’s word. You would not know whether madness itself could be so mad or dullness itself so dull as is our blockhead Henry. Perhaps this is to verify the proverb: “Kings and fools are born—not made.” What fool would say: “I declare that there are seven sacraments, but I shall leave untouched the principal argument of my opponent”? You would think this book were published by a noted enemy of the king to the king’s lasting disgrace.”

I came across this because a seminary student was telling me how he was learning about invective from Constance Furey’s “Invective and Discernment in Martin Luther, D. Erasmus, and Thomas More,” The Harvard Theological Review, 98: 469-488 (October 2005).⁴ Luther was vehement even before the Reformation. When he was appointed to a high position with his Augustinian monastic order, he preached the May 1, 1515 “election sermon” Contra Vitium Detractionis (On the Vice of Slander) to his fellow monks solemnly assembled.⁵ He said,

A backbiter does nothing but chew with his teeth the excrements of other people and sniff at their filth like a swine. Thus, human feces becomes the greatest pollutant, topped only by Teuffels Dreck.

My source, “Teufelsdreck: Eschatology and Scatology in the "Old" Luther,” by Heiko Oberman (The Sixteenth Century Journal, 19: 435-50 (Autumn, 1988)) summarizes the rest of the sermon thus:

Whereas it is typical for a human being that he will defecate in private, the detractor makes it a public session. He defames by changing a good odor (i.e., bona fama, good reputation) into evil stench, and he delights rolling in feces; according to God's just judgment he does not deserve better: 'Flee him, man . .. since the maw of the slanderer is the chasm of hell which spews stench from the abyss of all filth. And now, Luther breaks into German, when the great slanderer comes and says, 'Sehet wie hat sich der beschissen' -see how he covered himself with [—] - then the effective answer is, 'Das frissestu!"- stuff it, eat it yourself. This 'scatological' counterattack is not merely a good defense—it is the only defense.

There are many more revealing aspects to this sermon, which for understandable reasons has never been translated, or for that matter quoted by Luther scholars. The main point is, however, that all true Christians stand in a large anti-defamation league and are called upon to combat the God-awful, filthy adversary, using his own weapons and his own strategy: "Get lost Satan, eat your own [—]!

Modern evangelicals don’t preach like this. They would cite Matthew 5:22:

But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, You fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.

That’s not it. The phrase “without a cause” erases that excuse for avoiding invective and being nice to everybody instead. And it isn’t just Luther. Calvin and Knox are not dissimilar, though they, being less Hebraist in their outlook, are less earthy. Erasmus is even better at satire than Luther, playing the Greek rhetorician in The Praise of Folly and other works. What surprised me in Professor Furie’s essay was that Sir Thomas More could give as good as his master Henry VIII got. We think of More from the play A Man for All Seasons, as a kindly and civil man, understated and intellectual, perhaps a little too holy for this earth. But,

“These very words of Luther, reader, on which he so excessively plumes himself, not only are absolutely false but contain almost as many errors as there are words. A little later when I come to what he calls: his general response I will demonstrate this fact according to proofs taken from the king’s book, so that anyone may readily perceive it. Besides this, I will show not only that the scoundrel does away with all the traditions of men, even those which he ought to obey, but also that he does away with the traditions of God. And nevertheless not content with this, he attacks by means of every possible strategem those very scriptures of God for the sovereign authority of which he pretends to fight. In that passage I will make clear how foolishly he ridicules the royal majesty’s method of disputing, which consists of opposing to the authority of a single buffoon the authority of so many holy fathers, the custom of so many centuries and the public faith of the whole Church. At the same time I will also make clear that the faulty method of disputing by begging the question, which he attributes to others with so much insolence, is his own sole and almost only form of disputing. Moreover, I will show that he falls into this practice especially in the very passages in which he most fiercely reproaches and upbraids others for it. Then, at the point suited to the purpose, we shall winnow those words in which he boasts of himself so inordinately that he overwhelms his readers with darkness, and we shall scatter with the winnowing wind this chaff that he labors to sell for grain.”

This scoundrel is painfully tormented by the fact that the royal majesty’s learning in almost all disciplines and especially in theology is too well known and, in other lands besides Britain, too celebrated for the dolt to be able to persuade anyone that the most wise king wished to seek renown through another man’s book at the expense of a frenzied friarlet. (A Response to Luther tr. from Latin.)

“Frenzied friarlet” is good. How can a mere professor dare argue against the King of England and his royal Chancellor?⁶ It is unseemly even in an earl. The Earl of Kent whom I quoted at the start of this essay tried to prevent King Lear from resigning his kingdom to his two evil daughters and disinheriting his good daughter, Cordelia. Lear told him to have better manners than to talk thus to a king. Kent replied,

Be Kent unmannerly
When Lear is mad. What wouldst thou do, old man?
Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak
When power to flattery bows? To plainness honor’s bound
When majesty falls to folly . . .

Kill thy physician, and thy fee bestow
Upon the foul disease. Revoke thy gift,
Or whilst I can vent clamor from my throat,
I’ll tell thee thou dost evil.

The result is that Kent gets fired as Earl and sent into exile (which is more than my Dean and Provost could do). Kent does get offered joint rule of the kingdom at the end of the play, but by then Lear and Cordelia are dead and Kent doesn’t care about status anyway.

But that isn’t the main reason to avoid invective. The main reason is that it’s difficult to do well. The desire to use invective is good, but one must think twice before using it, and know its proper place. I don’t know if I could do it myself. I can manage a certain amount of satire and insult, but I haven’t really tried my hand at invective per se. The seminary student who told me of the Furey article said that his class was warned against it as being a dangerous tool. It is dangerous to one’s soul, since it can lead to malice and waspishness and to delight in scoring rhetorical points. That’s true of all rhetorical devices, actually, and is Plato’s complaint against the Sophists; Socrates uses rhetorical tricks too, but he is great-souled enough to carry it off.

But invective is also dangerous because it can backfire. The proper use of invective is poetic: to create a picture that is true but hard to put into "if-then” statements. It is encapsulation of an argument, a quick and entertaining summary. To be used properly, it has to have truth and argument to back it up. You need to use invective so that the listener thinks, “Yes, he’s got that guy pegged.” It is a flourish to be used at the start or end of an argument, to introduce or to summarize, with the main argument and explanation in between. If used carelessly, it boomerangs. If you call an economics professor “stupid”, people are likely to think about your own IQ level. If you call an honest man “unfair”, people are likely to notice your own bullying. If you call someone whose views you disagree with “intolerant”, people are likely to wonder about your own tolerance for other opinions. If you are powerful, you can think you’re getting away with invective, but the fate of the powerful is not to avoid getting laughed at—but to be laughed at behind their backs.

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1. This was not all one phrase. I left out the filler words. For the original, see “Dean's Response to Important Faculty Issue”, a memo “To the Students, Faculty, and Staff of the Kelley School,” Idalene Fay Kesner, Nov. 20, 2019 at 2:19 PM.

2. You can’t believe a university administrator would say such things? That’s what footnotes are for. Take a look at “On the First Amendment,” memo, Lauren Robel (November 2019) (or here). These things backfire. The faculty committee recommended Lauren to the Trustees as one of two finalists for President of Indiana University the year after this, and the Trustees decided to start the search over again instead. University bureaucrats are not supposed to use invective; they are supposed to be as unimaginative as possible and choke their adversaries with billows of bureaucratic fluff.

3. Henry VI, part 3, Act 1, Sc. 4. President Myles McRobbie, playing Henry to the ladies’ Katherine, remained prudently silent as they attempted to put out my eyes (cf. the Duke of York’s fate). Fortunately I had no Rutland for them to handkerchief .

4. Why did Professor Furey write “D. Erasmus” rather than “Desiderius Erasmus” in parallel with Martin and Thomas? The answer is a Desideratum E. Rasmusi.

5. Detractio means “bloodletting”, “removal”, “purging” or “slander”. Here are its uses in the Vulgate:

“Deponentes igitur omnem malitiam et omnem dolum et simulationes et invidias et omnes detractiones” (I Peter 2:1)

“Conversationem vestram inter gentes habentes bonam ut in eo quod detractant de vobis tamquam de malefactoribus ex bonis operibus considerantes glorificent Deum in die visitationis” (I Peter 2:12)

”Detractores Deo odibiles contumeliosos superbos elatos inventores malorum parentibus non oboedientes,” (Romans 1:30)

”Timeo enim ne forte cum venero non quales volo inveniam vos et ego inveniar a vobis qualem non vultis ne forte contentiones aemulationes animositates dissensiones detractiones susurrationes inflationes seditiones sint inter vos” (II Corinthians 12:20).

6. I just had a thought. It really *is* unusual for a king to write a book, even a king as intelligent and well-educated as Henry (he was also bloody,disloyal, tyrannical, gluttonous, hypocritical, and lecherous, but that’s beside the point). Why is it that Thomas is so angry? Could it be that Henry’s book was ghost-written? And could that ghost be the author of Utopia, and could his reward be . . . the chancellorship? A question for another day.