De arte praedicatoria

These authorities offer a remedy against detraction; Jerome says: "When some deed is invented by a slanderer, another's reputation is troubled." The same says: You cannot justly reprove in others what you yourself do; nor can you accuse another of pretense while you yourself are held guilty. Likewise: Beware lest you have an itching tongue or itching ears, that is, lest you yourself speak ill of others, or listen to others speaking ill. "Speak ill of no one, and do not think yourself holy for tearing others apart, for wounding others with your slanders. This is not correcting, but indulging your own vice." Likewise: It is unfitting to be hidden in body while the tongue wanders over the whole world. Take care lest, while you reprove vices, you fall into the vice of detraction. Likewise: The tribe of slaves is complaining, and however much they are troubled, it is always too little for them; for they do not consider what is given, but how much, and console their grief only with slanders. The same: "He who frequently slanders others offends a great many; it is base to tear apart the absent, and to describe another's life; he is less eloquent who excuses himself by another's fault." The slanderer bears the image of a scorpion, because just as the scorpion presents the face of a maiden and then sends out its sting, and inflicts a sharp wound from above; so the slanderer offers favorable words to men's faces, and in secret conceals the sting of detraction, and as though wounding from above, slanders his betters.

O man, what do you think of yourself, while you hurl the dart of detraction? The first arrow returns upon you, and the wound is inflicted on you before it is inflicted on others. You poorly conceal the enormity of your own deed, you who wish to cloak it by slandering another. While you slander others, you make yourself suspect, you make yourself hateful to everyone, and those whom you should befriend with honest words, you strive to make your enemies through the poison of detraction. While you strive to defame others, you infect yourself more deeply; and what you invent falsely about others, you find true in yourself. Of slanderers it is said: Their throat is an open sepulcher, etc.¹ A sepulcher whitened outside holds the stench of a corpse within; so the slanderer, wishing to color his inner malice, breaks out into the bite of detraction. But by this the sepulcher is rather opened, and the stench of inner malice escapes. Slanderers bear the image of dogs, who indiscriminately intend to bark and inflict bites on everyone. These are the ones who find a knot in a bulrush, a stain on the spotless, an angle in the round, darkness in the splendid. This is the plague of hypocrites, the bite of the envious; that plague spares no one, increases guilt, diminishes grace, errs against one's neighbor, sins against the Holy Spirit. Thundering with this malignant plague the Scribes and Pharisees said: He casts out demons by Beelzebub, the prince of demons.² And others cried out: You are a Samaritan, and have a demon.³

O man, what advantage is there in detraction? What use in a slandering tooth? While you believe you harm your neighbor, you rather add to his honor; for it is the good who are usually slandered, and the corruption of envy rages fiercely against virtue. For the slandering tongue disdains to exercise its malice against vices, and arms itself entirely to diminish a neighbor's righteousness, and so with the rust of its detraction it polishes another's reputation, and by its biting purges and exalts another's glory. Detraction proclaims envy, and lays bare the malice of the mind; and what is unknown within, it vomits out through the poison of detraction.

O man, if you accuse, accuse with measure, reprove with caution, not so that your neighbor is scandalized, but so that he is corrected. Accuse, not to cloak your own crime, but to heal another's wound. Detraction belongs to buffoons, who flatter in order to squeeze out money; who slander to spur the rich into making gifts; who play upon the ears of the powerful through flattery; who weigh their praises according to the gifts of the table, who acquire through detraction what they cannot acquire through virtues. The tongue of these men, which hunts for food, will become food for eternal fire; and the tongue that draws gifts through detraction will be torn apart by the punishment of hell.

Detraction is the enemy of the mother of virtues, namely charity; whoever slanders his neighbor puts charity to flight from himself, because the Holy Spirit will flee the pretense of detraction, abhorring the lie of reproof, the sin of detraction. He who offends the Holy Spirit scarcely finds a place of forgiveness, either here or in the future. O man, who are ash and dust, with what face, with what brow steeped in the mark of shame, do you dare to vomit the poison of detraction upon a better man, or to pronounce a judge's sentence over a lesser evil, or even a small one? If you judge your neighbor unjustly, you will be judged justly by one greater than you: for the judgment of detraction, you will feel the eternal judgment of damnation.