The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (14 page)

While Ockham’s observation may lack originality, it resonated in novel ways with significant early fourteenth-century theological discussions concerning the nature of vision, cognition, and the status of human claims to knowledge. These debates themselves were ultimately connected to ongoing controversies about the nature of divine omnipotence that had received a decided jump start with the infamous Condemnation of 1277, in which theologians representing the bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, condemned 219 propositions, many of which were deemed to have placed undue restrictions and limits on what God can do. The Franciscan theologian Peter Aureol set the stage for much of this discussion concerning the nature of vision in his commentary on Peter Lombard’s
Sentences
. Unhappy with the epistemological theories of his predecessor, John Duns Scotus, Aureol points to a number of familiar experiences of visual error and illusion, experiences in which things appear differently than they really are, in which we see things that don’t exist. Large castles look tiny from great distances, and straight sticks appear broken or bent when partly submerged in water. Often after staring at the sun we continue to perceive patches of light even though we have averted our gaze or closed our eyes. Reflecting on experiences like these, Aureol concludes that if they can happen naturally, they can certainly happen through God’s
direct intervention.
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William Ockham himself would become the most famous player in these debates when he framed the possibility of this sort of divine deception in a simple thought experiment. Imagine you are looking at a star. Now imagine that God, who can do anything, destroys the star while conserving your vision of it. What you now see is a nonexistent star. There is no necessary connection between what you see and what exists.
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The Eucharistic miracle could hardly have seemed that much different from Ockham’s mischievous star-destroying God. In both cases, the viewer sees something, either a star or a piece of bread, that no longer exists. In both cases, it is God who is responsible for this sudden and imperceptible interruption in the natural order. Given these similarities, what does it mean to claim “Christ cannot lie” or “There is no room for falsity in the miracle of Eucharist”?

In the 1330s, the English Dominican Robert Holkot offered shockingly new answers to these questions. During his life, Holkot was a well-known figure whose commentary on the Book of Wisdom would remain popular for centuries. Holkot’s analysis of the Eucharist, like Ockham’s discussion of the star, begins with a recognition of God’s omnipotence and human weakness. God can do more than the intellect can understand, Holkot asserts, and if God wishes, he can hide the entire world under the appearance of a mouse, the substance of an ass under the appearance of a man, even a thousand asses under the appearance of a single man.
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For Holkot, the possibility of this sort of divine activity does nothing to impugn God’s goodness. It simply reveals the limits of human knowledge, and he readily admits that we can have no absolute certitude when it comes to knowledge about singular things, of mice and men and stars.
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For all that, when we see something, we do not normally feel compelled to doubt its existence, and Holkot believes this response is reasonable. “I am sufficiently persuaded,” he concludes, “that God would not work such transmutations because he has not revealed such things to anyone, nor does it appear that he would do such things unless great utility would result.”
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Holkot’s willingness to frame his discussion of the Eucharist in terms of deception sets him somewhat apart from most everyone
else who had written on the topic. In order to explain away any possible deception and falsity in the very sacrament of truth, earlier theologians had made recourse to the language of figures and mysteries, to the fittingness of what appears in relation to the sacrament’s deeper and ultimate truths. The anonymous author of the early fourteenth-century preaching manual the
Fasciculus Morum
argues that the Eucharist’s perceptual discrepancies, far from being deceptions or illusions, are actually paradoxes whose meaning, if properly understood, can deepen the believer’s faith. The whiteness of the consecrated host, for example, indicates that we ought “to be pure and white in the chastity and purity of our life.”
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On a more visceral level, the appearance of bread served a quite useful purpose. Imagine the disgust we might experience were the reality of what we were eating not hidden from us behind the appearance of simple bread, wrote Ambrose, and a chorus of subsequent theologians pronounced their agreement.
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While Holkot accepts these sorts of explanations, it is telling that in his actual analysis of the sacrament he leaves the entire discussion at the level of sensory awareness. He never redefines the Eucharist’s perceptual challenges as figurative paradoxes, and this means that he never shifts the analysis from the level of empirical to spiritual experience. Holkot opts to define the believer’s position with respect to the Eucharist entirely in terms of its deceptive qualities. Just like Ockham’s thought experiment with the star, Holkot treats the Eucharist as an example of seeing something that no longer exists.

Holkot returns to the problem of divine deception repeatedly in his commentary, constantly expanding the extent of God’s potentially misleading behavior. During an analysis of God’s knowledge, he asks whether God could promise or reveal something to someone knowing all the while that he has no intention of keeping that promise. Citing Augustine’s
On Lying
(a book we will discuss in the next chapter), Holkot notes, “A lie is to say something false with the intention of deceiving.” Augustine had in fact written this, but Holkot provides an illuminating gloss. “[Augustine’s] opinion ought to be explained like this: A lie is to say something false with an inordinate intention to deceive.” Since God cannot act inordinately,
that is, since God cannot do anything that is not suitable to his nature, it follows that by definition God cannot lie. From our perspective this may seem like little more than mere wordplay, leaving us at a loss to know when God is or is not telling the truth. Holkot simply accepts this possibility. There is no reason, he adds, why God cannot fittingly, yet “knowingly, assert something false and with the intention of deceiving a creature.” And so it is, Holkot explains, that God rightfully deceived the Egyptians and continues to deceive demons, not to mention various and sundry sinners. Invoking the central idea behind the Devil’s mousetrap, Holkot adds that Christ intentionally concealed the nature of his birth from the Devil.
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Rummaging through both the Old and New Testaments, Holkot finds numerous examples in which God personally deceives not only evil men but also the good. Among other examples, he reminds his readers of how God famously deceived Abraham when he ordered the old man to sacrifice his only son Isaac. Even Christ was not above misleading his parents. When he was twelve, as his parents left Jerusalem with a crowd of festivalgoers, Christ deceived Mary, causing her to think he was with Joseph and the other men when he had actually hidden himself away, only to be found three days later speaking with the priests of the temple. Scripture, Holkot notes, is replete with stories of good people blamelessly lying to other good people. Rebecca and Jacob, to name but one of the many examples he offers, deceive Isaac when Jacob pretends to be his brother Esau. “Therefore,” Holkot adds, “God deceives a good man through good men.”
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None of this much worries Holkot, who distinguishes between appropriate and inappropriate deceptions. “To deceive” simply means to cause a person to have a false belief. While false beliefs can be instilled for entirely unworthy, malicious, disordered, and unjust reasons, they can also be instilled for entirely appropriate, useful, and beneficial reasons.
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Needless to say, God’s deceptions of the good, just like his deceptions of the evil, by definition can never be disordered or unjust. Whenever and whomever he deceives, God has his reasons, even if they remain forever beyond our capacity to understand, and those reasons are appropriate, useful, and entirely just.

Holkot’s expansive conception of God’s deceptive powers also helps to explain his fascination with illusions, substitutions, and false copies. In the third book of his commentary on the
Sentences
, when he takes up the topic of Christ’s incarnation, for example, he orients the entire discussion around the problem of hidden identity. He begins the discussion with a question: “Was it possible for the son of God to have been incarnated?” and immediately offers a reason why it was not possible. Imagine that the incarnate Christ looked so much like Jacob that “no one could look at them and tell them apart.” Now imagine that Peter sees Jacob, believes him to be Christ, and begins to worship him as God. Would Peter’s adoration be meritorious or damning? Holkot is quick to reject this as any sort of argument against the incarnation, an event that the entire Church accepts as true. It does, however, set the stage for a wide-ranging discussion concerning the moral status of human conduct in what might be described as situations of extreme duress, misinformation, and misperception. Is a person excused from the sin of idolatry who worships the Devil transfigured into the likeness of Christ? Can someone win merit through false faith? Did Abraham absolutely believe that he should sacrifice Isaac as God had commanded?
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Holkot’s answer to these sorts of questions is simple and straightforward. Just as God’s actions (no matter how confusing they are from our perspective) are never disordered or irrational, neither are his judgments of our actions. We can only be judged based on our capacities, on our ability or inability to discern the truth in any given set of circumstances. Imagine the case of John who sees the Devil transfigured into the image of Christ. The illusion is perfect, and it is entirely beyond anyone’s power to see through it. In such a situation can the individual be blamed for believing the Devil is Christ, for worshipping the Devil as Christ? “A person is excused from sin,” Holkot writes, “when it arises out of invincible ignorance.” As Holkot reads the situation, this person’s actions would not only be blameless, they would be meritorious. It is impossible for John to discern the terrible truth of the vision that confronts him. Given what he cannot help but see, he
believes and behaves as he should. Nothing more can be asked of people.
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Or as Holkot would put it in a different context, in words that would come to define much of Catholic thought even as they outraged sixteenth-century reformers, if man does what he can, he will not be damned.
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Holkot’s analysis of the Eucharist as an example of divine deception would profoundly influence even those who found his ideas appalling. Writing in 1379, some thirty-two years after Holkot had fallen victim to the plague, another English theologian, John Wyclif, a committed pastor, fiery preacher, and future heretic, challenged Catholic orthodoxy and denounced the very notion that Christ’s body was somehow present behind or within the host. “Since God chose to give us so great a gift,” Wyclif writes, “it hardly seems fitting with the splendor of his truth, that he would deliver himself to us to honor in a veil.” As far as Wyclif is concerned, God would have to behave like the Devil himself were he to work the sort of miraculous, yet invisible, transformation in the host that would create such a radical rift between what appears and what exists. For all intents and purposes, Wyclif accepts Holkot’s analysis of the Eucharist as an example of supernatural deception. Unlike Holkot, Wyclif finds such miraculous interventions entirely antithetical to the nature of God. “Every such deception is evil,” Wyclif argues, “for man naturally seeks to know the truth,” and since our senses “judge that the very substance of bread and wine remain after consecration, and not just their appearance, it does not seem appropriate for the Lord of Truth to introduce such an illusion when graciously communicating so worthy a gift.”
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Wyclif had many reasons for rejecting the dogma of the bodily presence of Christ in the Eucharist, reasons related to his own rather singular physical and metaphysical theories, as well as to his reading of scripture and the decisions of Church councils.
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Even the nature of Eucharistic adoration among the laity throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the ever-intensifying and passionate desire to see the host during mass, the explosion of miracle tales, reliquaries, and the popularity of Corpus Christi
festivals played a part in convincing him that the religious beliefs and practices of his fellow Christians had gone seriously offtrack.
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Implicated in all these reasons is something even more fundamental, a logical and moral imperative that for Wyclif defines God’s very nature and essence. Given that God made us to be creatures who “naturally seek to know the truth,” who make inferences about what exists based on what we see, God would be violating his own wishes, entangling himself in self-contradictions were he to lead our senses astray, especially in something so important as the celebration of the Last Supper.
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The epistemological consequences of such deception would be devastating. It would undermine every system of knowledge and render our every certitude about the world worthless. Appearances would have no necessary connection to reality, and the evidence of our senses would be rendered meaningless.
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We would find ourselves like the ancient skeptics, affirming that nothing can be known, asserting nothing but affirmations of our own ignorance. From our perspective, the world would become nothing but a “ball of accidents,” all surface and no depth, forever misleading, deceiving, damning. We would be unable to know the truth of our vows, of our faith, of our sanctity, of scripture itself.

“I am horrified,” Wyclif writes suddenly and without warning in the middle of a sermon on the importance of charity, “at the very idea that a quality or any sort of accident could exist on its own and not inhere in a substance.”
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Wyclif’s horror at this moment certainly has something to do with the nightmare of a world made unknowable, but its emotional register derives from a related and much more ominous possibility. If illusory appearances can exist in the world, then why can’t they also exist within our own souls? What if we could perceive the presence of charity within ourselves and yet still be damned? God’s deceptions, no longer limited to the external world, would infiltrate our souls, would render us invisible to ourselves. But none of this is possible, or so Wyclif claims, because God is all-powerful and deception is incompatible with omnipotence. A litany of Catholic thinkers from Augustine in the fourth century to Aquinas in the thirteenth
century would have agreed with this assertion, but then again, as we have seen, many of those same Catholic thinkers also believed the Bible offered evidence of some very significant divinely instigated deceptions. Wyclif simply refused to accept this apparent or potential lapse between divine nature and divine conduct.