The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (13 page)

As Bonaventure explains in his
Collations on the Six Days
, prudence is one of the four cardinal virtues, along with temperance, justice, and fortitude. In the
Collations
, Bonaventure weaves together ideas from a variety of classic authorities, both pagan and Christian, to define the nature of these virtues, and of prudence in particular. “A virtue is so called,” Bonaventure writes, drawing from Cicero’s popular definition, “because it is the strength of the mind for the performance of good and the avoidance of evil.” Doing good and avoiding evil requires that a person avoid extremes, that a person’s actions exemplify what Aristotle refers to as “the quality of intermediateness.” Bonaventure certainly does not
mean that the virtuous act is perfectly situated between emotional extremes, the sort of numb emotionless center between passionate alternatives. It is the act that best fits the demands of the moment, the right balance between sweetness and severity, leniency and justice, given the particular circumstances. “Virtue,” Bonaventure adds, now borrowing from Augustine, “is nothing else than a proper measure.” The virtuous act, in other words, is measured to fit the situation, and it is prudence that makes these all-important evaluations. In this sense, prudence is an intellectual virtue rooted in a “knowledge of good and evil things and the distinctions between them.” It is dependent on memory, intelligence, and providence, refined through reflection on experience. The goal of prudence is not speculative truth but practical knowledge geared toward the present moment and its unique, singular demands. “Prudence,” Bonaventure explains, “finds this proper measure, so that you do not go too far in anything, but remain close to the center. Hence prudence is the driver of the virtues. Wherefore prudence says: I have found the proper measure; and temperance acts as a watchman and says: I too wanted this; and justice acts as a distributor, willing not only for itself, but also for the other; and because many adversities occur after that, fortitude acts as a defender, lest the proper measure be lost.”
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Craftiness or cunning,
astutia
, by contrast, almost always refers to inappropriate, even malicious behavior and is a constant feature in Bonaventure’s description of the fallen angels. For example, in a discussion about how demons sometimes intentionally deceive astrologers, Bonaventure observes that “so great is the craftiness of demons, that they know how to hide their fraud, making it clear that they did not err, but rather that it was the astronomer who was guilty of the error or defect in the prognostication.”
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Bonaventure’s contemporary Thomas Aquinas offers a more delineated account of craftiness. According to Aquinas, the essence of craftiness resides in the use of unfit means to achieve one’s desires. A person commits the sin of craftiness, Aquinas explains, “when, in order to obtain a certain end, whether good or evil, one uses means that are not true but fictitious and counterfeit.” The
emphasis on means, not ends, is crucial. Just as prudence is an intellectual virtue concerned with properly fitting and measuring our actions to their contexts, so craftiness, the sin “opposed to prudence,” is characterized by actions that willfully disregard this proper fit and measure, actions that are false and fictitious. Ends do not absolve means, and Aquinas is very clear that craftiness is a sin even if it is directed toward a good end.
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So far so good, except Aquinas does little in this section of his
Summa of Theology
to offer much in the way of guidance concerning what makes some, but not all, deceptive actions false and counterfeit, nor for that matter does Bonaventure. Of course, there is the rough-and-ready, not to mention absolute and unquestionable, guidance to be found in the examples of Christ and the Devil. Christ’s actions, no matter how described, are most prudent, most fitting, and completely sinless, even if it is occasionally difficult to reconcile them with the vague standards encompassed in Aquinas’s definition of craftiness. As we have seen, while Gregory of Nyssa stressed that God’s actions manifested the perfect blend of wisdom, justice, and goodness, Ambrose often resorted to the very worrisome ends-justify-the-means style of reasoning that Aquinas would later condemn. Ambrose is more blunt than most prior or subsequent theologians, happy as he is to describe Christ’s actions as holy deceptions and pious frauds. Still, Ambrose, more often than not, invokes the same sorts of justifications for Christ’s actions that Gregory and Augustine invoke, that Bonaventure would continue to invoke centuries later. Christ’s actions are prudent, justified, and sinless because they perfectly counter the Devil’s actions: deception counters deception, fraud counters fraud and, for all that, prudence counters cunning.

Most important, most obvious, and therefore all too easy to overlook, everyone agreed that Christ’s actions needed to be understood and interpreted in the context of the biblical stories themselves, in the context of the grand outline of human history beginning with the Fall and culminating in the Christ’s resurrection from the dead and ascension into heaven. Christ’s actions were most prudent and just because they achieved their ends in the
most fitting and appropriate manner possible. Given the specific circumstances of mankind’s first transgression and the unique problems to which it gave rise—and this holds whether Christ’s work was understood as a form of purchasing man from the Devil or as atonement to an offended God—certain sorts of potentially and sometimes intentionally misleading actions, disguises, and statements were acceptable, even necessary, and never less than good. Implicit in this approach to Christ’s work is the idea that quite similar types of actions or behavior can, in different circumstances, take on very different moral qualities. Satan, when he disguises himself as a serpent to deceive Eve, commits an act of guile and craftiness, but when Christ disguises himself as a mere man to deceive Satan, he acts with justice and prudence. William Langland, the fourteenth-century author of
Piers Plowman
, sums up this idea nicely when he writes, “And just as man was beguiled by the guiler’s guile, so shall grace from which all began finally succeed and beguile the guiler, and that’s a good trick, Art to deceive art.”
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The idea that circumstances could define or even make the sin was a truism of pastoral literature. Writing in the twelfth century, Alan of Lille notes that the gravity of a sin often depends on its origins and causes. “He sins more gravely,” Alan notes, “who is seduced by the smell of lucre or sweet caresses, than if he is deceived through drunkenness.”
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Thomas Chobham concurred in his influential early thirteenth-century penitential treatise, the
Summa confessorum
, in which he offers detailed analyses of how the circumstances surrounding and defining our actions can transform venial sins into mortal sins. Who committed the sin? When and where did the sinner commit it, and for what reasons? As Chobham puts it, “a person sins less who steals in order to feed his father, than he who steals so that he may live lavishly.”
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Sometimes circumstances could determine whether an action was sinful at all. The fourteenth-century Spanish curate Guido of Monte Rocherii explains that a sin can be mortal in two ways, because the deed itself is sinful (and here he cites fornication) or because of the intention governing the deed. “To sing in church,” he offers by way
of an entirely noncontroversial example, “is not a mortal sin, indeed it can be meritorious. But to sing in church in order to please a woman and entice her to sin is a mortal sin.”
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Just as the circumstances define our actions, so it seems, they define God’s actions, and from the earliest Christian centuries until at least the fifteenth century a great many people believed God could deceive, could commit fraud, perhaps could lie. Theologians who in some places loudly proclaim that God’s perfection makes it impossible for him to be a deceiver, in other places praise God’s deceptions. Theologians who claim God merely allows or permits evil actions to occur, who argue that God never directly deceives, invoke gripping and memorable metaphors in honor of Christ’s duping the Devil. Admittedly, the circumstances demanded this response and, given those circumstances, theologians contended that God’s actions were prudent, fair, and perfectly in keeping with the nature of an all-powerful being. Extreme situations, after all, call for extreme measures. Jacobus de Voragine, the Dominican author of one the most popular religious works of the entire Middle Ages,
The Golden Legend
, makes this abundantly clear in his description of Christ’s passion. In words not so different from those Bonaventure had used in his
Sentences
commentary, and invoking the language of debts, fishhooks, and mousetraps, Jacobus describes how “our redemption was best adapted to accomplish the defeat of man’s enemy.” The timing of Christ’s actions, their place, and their nature were all perfectly suited to their goal, to the circumstances.
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Of course, all this left open another, more troubling question. Could God deceive other types of creatures, not merely sinners, demons, and the Devil, but even the faithful? Could God deceive those who love him?

D
IVINE
D
ECEPTION AND THE
S
ACRAMENT OF
T
RUTH

At the center of medieval religious life was the mass, and at the very center of the mass was the celebration of the Eucharist. “Take away this sacrament from the Church,” explains Bonaventure in
On Preparing for the Mass
, a training manual he wrote for Franciscan novices in the 1250s, “and only error and faithlessness would remain in this world. The Christian people, like a herd of swine, would be dispersed, consigned to idolatry like all those other infidels. But through this sacrament the Church stands firm, faith is strengthened, the Christian religion and divine worship thrive. It is for all these reasons that Christ said, ‘Behold, I am with you always to the end of time.’ ”
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The entire mass proclaimed the truth of Christ’s promise and the faith he inspired, but it was the consecration of the host that transformed this promise into reality. Facing the altar with his back to the parishioners, the priest would shield the host from their view as he began to intone the words of institution, the words Christ had spoken at the Last Supper: “This is my body.” Incense, wafted from the wings, from the altar, would slowly fill the church as the priest reached the end of the consecration with Christ’s command “Do this in memory of me.” Suddenly, the ringing of bells would alert everyone to the miraculous transformation that had taken place. Only then would the priest raise his arms above his head, revealing to an eager audience the sacramental bread now transformed into the very body and blood of Christ.
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Precisely because the truth of the entire religion rested in this sacramental miracle, most theological treatises, pastoral manuals, and popular devotional works would at some point assert that there could be no room for deception, no falsity, in it. As the Parisian-trained theologian William of Auxerre would put it in the 1240s, “deception [
simulatio
] has no place where the truth of the body of Christ is concerned.”
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For his part, William was drawing on an idea that dated at least as far back as the 830s, to the writings of the German monk Paschasius Radbertus. In a treatise originally written for a monastic audience and subsequently presented to Charles the Bald in 844, Radbertus reminds his readers that it was Christ himself who celebrated the Last Supper, that it was Christ himself who stated, as he held bread in his hands, “This is my body.” How are we to make sense of this statement? Radbertus assures his readers that Christ cannot lie. Invoking 1 John 6, he
writes, “Christ is truth and the truth is God. And if God is the truth, then whatever Christ promised in this mystery must necessarily be true.”
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What Christ promised, Radbertus argues, and what the Church would eventually confirm as official dogma, was that his very body, the body to which Mary gave birth and then nurtured, the body that suffered, died, and was buried only to rise again in three days, was really and truly present within the consecrated bread. Only the true presence of Christ’s body in the bread could render his words true, could prevent him from having lied to the apostles.

There would continue to be debates and disagreements about how best to account for this remarkable transformation. Even after the Fourth Lateran Council formally settled the issue in 1215 when it decreed that the transformation of bread into body occurred through a process known as “transubstantiation,” theologians continued to voice their displeasure with this particular solution.
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Doctrinal intricacies aside, almost everyone would have agreed with Thomas Aquinas who, writing in the 1270s, asserted that even though it remains invisible to our senses, we must accept that “the true body and blood of Christ is present in the sacrament…. You must not doubt whether this is true, but rather must faithfully accept the Savior’s words, since he is the Truth, he does not lie.”
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No matter who stated it, it was all too easy for some people to doubt this alleged truth. When John Pecham, the Franciscan theologian and soon to be archbishop of Canterbury looked into the matter in the late 1270s, he counted fifty separate miracles that must regularly occur every time any priest, anywhere in the world, says a mass and in so doing transforms the host, which never ceases to look like anything but a piece of bread, into the very body of Christ.
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Thirteenth- and fourteenth-century religious works are peppered with stories of laymen, laywomen, priests, and friars who find it impossible to accept that all these miraculous changes actually occur. Their skepticism is all too easy to understand. Unlike popular medieval wonder stories in which the consecrated host suddenly appears as a baby boy or a hunk of bloody
flesh in the priest’s hands, in which it heals deadly illnesses and sends heretical preachers to their watery demise, the official miracle of the Eucharist, like the lion chased by hunters, leaves no tangible traces.
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In the early 1320s, the English Franciscan William Ockham put the matter this way: “[I]t is clear that the body of Christ is not seen in the sacrament of the altar, it is only understood, only the appearance of the bread is really seen.” He then adds for good measure, “No one would hold that the body of Christ really is contained under the appearance of the bread were it not for the authority of the Savior and of the Church.”
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Ockham’s observation is hardly original, echoing as it does a sentiment present in every orthodox writer since Radbertus. We believe this happens, Ockham asserts, all empirical evidence to the contrary, simply because Christ tells us that it happens and Christ cannot lie.