The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment
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Authors: Dallas G. Denery II
The Devil Wins
The Devil Wins
A H
ISTORY OF
L
YING
from the
G
ARDEN OF
E
DEN
to the
E
NLIGHTENMENT
DALLAS G. DENERY II
Princeton University Press
Princeton and Oxford
Copyright © 2015 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
Jacket art courtesy of
briarpress.org
. Jacket design by Pamela Schnitter
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Denery, Dallas G. (Dallas George), 1964–
The devil wins : a history of lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment / Dallas G. Denery II.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-16321-5 (alk. paper)
1. Truthfulness and falsehood. I. Title.
BJ1421.D46 2014
177
ʹ
.309–dc23 2014006311
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in 10/13.5 Sabon.
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
F
OR
L
ORRY
Contents
I
NTRODUCTION
: Is It Ever Acceptable to Lie? 1
P
ART
O
NE
: Theologians Ask the Question
Six Days and Two Sentences Later 21
Making Sense of Genesis 1, 2, and 3 28
The Devil’s Lie from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages 35
The Devil’s Lie from the Middle Ages to the Reformation 47
From Satan’s Stratagems to Human Nature 55
On Lions, Fishhooks, and Mousetraps 67
Divine Deception and the Sacrament of Truth 77
Luther, Calvin, and the Hidden God 88
René Descartes, Pierre Bayle, and the End of Divine Deception 94
C
HAPTER
T
HREE
. Human Beings 105
Augustine among the Scholastics 119
Institutional Transformations 131
Equivocation, Mental Reservation, and Amphibology 135
From Pascal to Augustine and Beyond 145
P
ART
T
WO
: Courtiers and Women Ask the Question
Flatterers, Wheedlers, and Gossipmongers 153
Early Modern Uncertainty and Deception 158
Uncertainty and Skepticism in the Medieval Court 163
Entangled in Leviathan’s Loins 169
Christine de Pizan and Just Hypocrisy 175
Bernard Mandeville and the World Lies Built 190
All about Eve, All about Women 205
The Biology of Feminine Deceit 211
Christine de Pizan, Misogyny, and Self-Knowledge 216
Madeleine de Scudéry, the Salon, and the Pleasant Lie 237
C
ONCLUSION
: The Lie Becomes Modern 247
Acknowledgments
This book was a long time in the making and, before that, an even longer time in the putting off. Most of the doing and delaying occurred in three places, and I want to thank people from each of them.
Cambridge University has become a sort of home away from home. I owe a real debt of gratitude to Richard Newhauser, a great supporter and friend, who led an NEH seminar on the vices in medieval society at Darwin College during the summer of 2004. I began the preliminary research for this book that summer and profited from numerous conversations with Dwight Allman, Stan Benfell, Susan Dudash, Holly Johnson, Tom Parisi, and Derrick Pitard. In 2009, Nicolette Zeeman, along with Kantik Ghosh, Mishtooni Bose, and Rita Copeland, invited me to help organize a conference at King’s College on doubt and skepticism in the Middle Ages. The event allowed me to discuss my work with them, as well as with Hester Gelber, Christophe Grellard, Dominik Perler, and, especially, Eileen Sweeney, who has read various chapters with great care over the years. Two years later, Nicolette invited me back to present several chapters of my book at a three-day work-in-progress seminar during which I had very useful conversations with her, Bill Burwinkle, and Emily Corran. William D. Wood was kind enough to meet me for a beer in Oxford.
During the 2012–2013 academic year, I was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow at the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University. Under Alan Patten’s leadership, the Center was a convivial and lively place, and between the fellows and faculty at the Center, various other Princeton faculty, and an extraordinary number of visiting speakers, I incurred debts too many to recall. At
the Center, I benefited particularly from numerous mobile conversations with Alexander Voorhoeve, as well as with Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Kimberly Ferzan, Samuel Goldman, Christopher Heathwood, Bennet Helm, Nannerl Keohane, and the late, much beloved, Paul Sigmund. In addition, I had the pleasure to meet and talk things historical with Moshe Shluvosky and Sophie Lunn-Rockwell, both of whom were in residence at the Davis Center. I want to thank Rob Tempio at Princeton University Press for his early and continued enthusiasm for this book and books in general.
At Bowdoin College, a number of colleagues and friends have read and discussed various versions and stages of this book over the years, including Margaret Boyle, Mary Agnes Edsell, Paul Franco, Paul Friedland, Kristen Ghodsee, Page Herrlinger, Ann Kibbie, Aaron Kitch, Robert Morrison, Steve Perkinson, Patrick Rael, Meghan Roberts, Arielle Saiber, and Scott Sehon. It goes without saying that without our superb library staff this book would have been much more difficult to complete, but I must single out Guy Saldanha and everyone at Interlibrary Loan for their amazing facility at quickly tracking down even the most obscure material. Part of the research for this book was funded through a Kenan Family Research Grant, sponsored by the college. Georgia Whitaker and Maya Little helped construct the bibliography on very little notice. I must also thank seven years worth of seminar students who patiently and, hopefully, enjoyably, worked through a litany of biblical commentaries, court treatises, and theological quagmires as I struggled to figure out what this book would be about.
I want to thank Steven Justice and Stephen Lahey for commenting on early drafts, as well as Lisa Bitel, David Luscombe, Cary Nederman, Daniel Smail, and Nicholas Watson for their various kindnesses. I owe a real debt of gratitude to Jonathan Sheehan for his meticulous reading of the entire manuscript, the anonymous readers who reviewed the book for Princeton University Press, and Will Hively for his expert and attentive copyediting.
I dedicate this book to my wife Lorry.
A N
OTE ON THE
T
EXT
I have incorporated parts of the following previously published essays into this book: “From Sacred Mystery to Divine Deception: Robert Holkot, John Wyclif and the Transformation of Fourteenth Century Eucharistic Discourse,”
Journal of Religious History
, June 2005, 129–44; “Biblical Liars and Medieval Theologians,” in
The Seven Deadly Sins: From Individuals to Communities
, ed. Richard Newhauser (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007), 111–28; “Christine de Pizan against the Theologians: The Virtue of Lies in
The Book of the Three Virtues
,”
Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies
39:1 (2008): 229–47; “Christine de Pizan on Misogyny, Gossip and Possibility,” in
The Middle Ages in Texts and Texture
, ed. Jason Glenn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011): 309–21; and “Uncertainty and Deception in the Medieval and Early Modern Court,” in
Uncertain Knowledge in the Middle Ages
, ed. Dallas G. Denery II, Kantik Ghosh, and Nicolette Zeeman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014): 13–36.