Dante, flattery, and flatterers
Flattery seems like an obscure topic. You don’t hear or read much about it. Sure, there is the humorous expression, “flattery will get you everywhere,’’ but when did you last hear a homily on flattery?
What are we to make of flattery as a social vice?
And what about those who flatter?
The Church has something to say about it in her current Catechism1 and here is one man’s opinion — a strong one. It is that of Bishop Bonaventure Broderick. Written in 1939 for his weekly newspaper column; it appears along with many more of his columns in The Wit & Wisdom of Bishop Bonaventure Broderick: His Millbrook Round Table Columns.
“Flattery and Flatterers” by B. F. Broderick
There are few manifestations of the misery of human nature more astonishing or more pitiful than the ease and the completeness with which otherwise intelligent persons yield to the lure of flattery and the fascination of flatterers.
Some students of Dante's Divina Comedia think that this great author, in the “XVII Canto of the Inferno,” placed the souls of those who died guilty of this sin too deep down in the circles of his Hell and punished them too severely. As one who has had the opportunity not only to witness, but also to experience, the shamelessness of the wiles of this gentry, I think that if he erred at all it was on the side of leniency. Nobody who has ever had it in his power to dispense favors has escaped their brazen compliments.
I have made it a practice, whenever the public good seemed to require an expression of my opinion, to praise and to blame freely and fearlessly, but ever-honestly. Always, therefore, I despised those who were wont to “crook the pregnant hinges of the knee where thrift may follow fawning” (Shakespeare. Hamlet, Act III. Scene II. Hamlet to Horatio). With mock complaisance I was accustomed to silence them by saying: “That's fine! How did you happen to learn that you can further your suit with me by flattery after all other methods fail? As soon as a person tells me that I am young and good looking I begin to think: “What wonderful judgment he has!”
This reverie was provoked by my having read in The New York Times of last Tuesday the editorial comment made about a play, called “Caesar,” which made its debut in the Argentina Theatre, Rome, Italy, the evening before. The avowed author was Giovacchini Forzano, but, because it was unofficially understood that Benito Mussolini had collaborated with Forzano on this work, the Times editorial contained the following paragraph: “A gripping historical drama, comparable with Shakespeare, Goethe and Wagner at their best, and with a touch of genius that even these great men did not attain, was the consensus of opinion as expressed in the audience and in the newspapers.”
Nobody but a flatterer would be brazened enough to compare a modern dramatist with Shakespeare, and much less to say that the composition of this playwright showed a touch of genius which the Bard of Avon at his best did not display.
Were Dante to have written his Divina Comedia in the light of the development of the present-day politician and publicity agent, I am sure that he would have located flatterers in even a deeper circle of Hell than the one to which he actually consigned them.
CCC 2480 Every word or attitude is forbidden which by flattery, adulation, or complaisance encourages and confirms another in malicious acts and perverse conduct. Adulation is a grave fault if it makes one an accomplice in another's vices or grave sins. Neither the desire to be of service nor friendship justifies duplicitous speech. Adulation is a venial sin when it only seeks to be agreeable, to avoid evil, to meet a need, or to obtain legitimate advantages.