The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (17 page)

Descartes rejects this way of framing the problem and cautions his readers against inquiring into God’s intentions. Finite beings like us can have no truck with the infinite, and we “should not be so arrogant as to suppose that we can share in God’s plans,” he writes in the
Principles
, adding, “We should instead consider him as the efficient cause of all things; and starting from the divine attributes which by God’s will we have some knowledge of … see … what conclusions should be drawn concerning those effects which are apparent to our senses.”
⁹⁹
We must not, in other words, ask why God made the world. Rather, we must ask how he made it given the kind of being he is. What kind of being is God? Descartes believes, as did everyone who preceded him, that God is perfect and all-powerful. Perfection entails immutability because if change were possible it would imply an absence and future fulfillment of
goodness not yet possessed. In God, all perfection is fully realized in the simple unity of his unchanging being. God’s will, therefore, is also immutable, constant, even as it simultaneously predestines and sustains everything that occurs and exists. Deception is utterly incompatible with such a being because “in every case of deception some imperfection is to be found.”
¹⁰⁰

Theologians from Augustine to Calvin had sought to explain how deception could be made consistent with God’s nature. Descartes reframes the problem and asks, How can God will all things in such a way that he does not deceive and yet, from our perspective, it appears that he does? Descartes begins at the beginning, drawing out the creative implications of God’s nature and essence. As efficient cause, God is the creator of the universe, the “general” source of all motion and energy within it. His constancy and immutability guarantee that he sustains this universe as it was created, preserving always “the same quantity of motion in matter.”
¹⁰¹
God is infinitely wise and good, so we know his laws structure the universe in as benevolent a manner as possible. Put differently, the universe is a collection of matter in motion, organized through a minimal set of constant and unchanging laws designed to establish the best possible and most beneficial system in which beings like ourselves, souls embodied, can exist and thrive.
¹⁰²
Given God’s nature, we can rest assured that the established relation between body and soul, like the universe as whole, will also be most beneficially, intelligently, and wisely arranged. Our understanding is undeniably limited, but even here we have no right to complain that the role God assigns us “is not the principle one or the most perfect of all.” God is no deceiver, and he has given us the ability to avoid error and secure certainty. While God could have made us impervious to deception, we must assume that he has his reasons for constructing us the way he did. “I cannot deny,” Descartes writes, “that there may in some way be more perfection in the universe as a whole because some of its parts are not immune from error, while others are immune, than there would be if all the parts were exactly alike.”
¹⁰³

Even in such a divinely orchestrated and law-governed world—take the case of dropsy—it may well seem that these laws
intentionally deceives us. Again, Descartes warns, this is to consider God’s work relative to human interests. We cannot pretend to understand God’s intentions, nor can we pretend to understand our place in creation. We can, however, count on God’s constancy and goodness. He is not malicious in his designs. In the case of dropsy, Descartes explains, the false sense of thirst is the unavoidable consequence of a human body created in the best possible fashion given the structures of this creation. “It is much better,” Descartes writes, “that it should mislead on this occasion than it should always mislead when the body is in good health.”
¹⁰⁴
In his 1680
Treaty on Nature and Grace
, the French Oratorian priest Nicholas Malebranche offers a decidedly Cartesian elaboration on the relation between general laws and individual suffering. “These laws, on account of their simplicity, necessarily have unhappy consequences for us,” he explains, “but these consequences do not warrant that God change these laws into more composite ones. For his laws have a greater proportion of wisdom and fecundity to the work they produce than all others which he could establish for the same design.” Perhaps God could avoid “unhappy consequences” through “an infinite number of specific volitions,” Malebranche notes, “but his Wisdom which he loves more than his work, and the immutable and necessary order which is the rule of his volitions do not permit this.”
¹⁰⁵
God’s immutability checks random alterations within the order of a creation whose “unhappy consequences” can be discovered, even rectified, through attention to his unchanging laws.

God loses the ability to deceive as soon as he loses the ability to speak, and he loses the ability to speak as soon as he prefers the system to its moments.
¹⁰⁶
To imagine a God that speaks is to imagine God in human terms, a God who cares about individuals, who laughs, forgives, and punishes, who is invested and involved in the moment. The theological tradition could never escape this conception of God, because God had revealed himself through a historical narrative of exceptional and singular events—in the story of the Fall and our ever-lengthening exile from paradise, through the lying mouths of prophets, in the disguised incarnation of his only
son, and in Satan’s endless stratagems. These revelations of purposefully deceptive divine interactions with men needed to be rationalized with God’s goodness, even if only through forever vague allusions to God’s incomprehensible wisdom. For every satanic sophistry, God responds as the perfect and nobly upright orator, undoing cruel cunning with perfect prudence. Descartes’s philosophical redescription of God can allow for this narrative only as the dangerous exception to the rule. Divine revelation, Descartes admits, guarantees that there will be “some changes” to the immutable order of things, certain events inconsistent with the universe’s general laws and rules. Concerned he has granted too much, he then immediately qualifies and limits these supernatural intrusions into a divinely instituted order, “but apart from these we should not suppose that any other changes occur in God’s works, in case this suggests some inconstancy in God.”
¹⁰⁷

Bayle takes all this for granted. As they did with everything they touched, he argues, Scholastic theologians made a mess of scripture, needlessly complicating its simple and self-evident clarity. Bayle hasn’t the slightest doubt that every biblical story in which God deceives includes the keys for its own translation into a properly philosophical idiom through which God’s individual interventions in the world disappear into the orderly system of creation itself. Never mind centuries of exegetical labor that found it impossible to deny God’s deceptions. Never mind all those fourteenth-century theologians fascinated with God’s absolute and incomprehensible power, his ability to do all possible things. Bayle, following Malebranche following Descartes, accepts a God “who does not disturb the simplicity and uniformity of his ways in order to avoid a particular disaster.”
¹⁰⁸
All of this Bayle asserts in the name of a metaphysical conception of God, a God without human attributes, without emotion. Never mind, finally, that this is an impossible dream and any human conception of God will conceive of God in human terms. Bayle inherited Descartes’s greatest success, convincing God to give up rhetoric in exchange for the dreams of the philosophers, and the philosophers, evidently, dreamt of a curiously compromised world. A world in which paradise would no
longer be found in the memories of Eden, a garden without trouble or illness, but in the ruin once thought to have been the result of the Devil’s lie, the ruin of a fallen world now oozing with disease, requiring our endless toil. For the philosophers, the Devil, like God, never had to say anything, because God had always already listened to him and learned.

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Human Beings

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Over twelve hundred years of theological debate on deception ended in parody and vitriol. While the parody preceded, English readers encountered the vitriol first.

In the preface to his 1657 translation of Blaise Pascal’s satirical dismantling of post-Reformation Catholic ethical thought,
The Provincial Letters
, Henry Hammond, a widely respected royalist and Anglican cleric, could find nothing but insidious and dangerous scheming in “the mystery of Jesuitisme.” The Jesuits, Hammond contends, seek “to grasp all the world to themselves, and to usurp an universal empire over men’s consciences.” Rejecting God’s precepts and rules, they endeavor to win people over with a laxity that transforms sin into virtue. Unlike the first Christians, who willingly suffered persecution and calamity, never acquiescing to the false demands of the world, the Jesuits dispense “with all the obligations of evangelical purity” and treat every ethical rule “like a wax nose capable of all forms” as they “level the precepts of the gospel to the passions of men [and] make our tendency to future Beatitude consistent with the pleasures and enjoyment of this world.” In a final burst of outrage, Hammond writes, “Such societies of men are Academies of dissimulation and sycophancy, diabolically embarked in a design, of not only practicing, but maintaining and justifying whatever is most horrid and abominable in the sight of God and man.”
¹

Hammond’s preface and Pascal’s work notwithstanding, every Catholic theologian, Jesuit or otherwise, believed lying was a sin.
To have claimed otherwise would have been to contradict centuries of accumulated argument and authority beginning with the towering figure of Augustine, whose rejection of lies could hardly have been clearer. Every lie is a sin, the great bishop had argued, and every sin must be avoided. No hoped-for benefit, no amount of good to be achieved or evil to be prevented, can justify our lies. Augustine was adamant about this and believed the Bible itself supported his confidence. Near the very beginning of
Against Lying
, a treatise composed in 420, Augustine approvingly quotes from Paul’s letter to the Romans: “Thou hatest all the workers of iniquity; thou wilt destroy all that speak a lie.” There is no room for misinterpretation here, Augustine contends, no suggestion that God looks favorably on certain lies, unfavorably on others. The apostle “has brought forth a universal proposition, saying, ‘Thou wilt destroy all that speak a lie.’ ”
²
To think anything different is to run up against irrefutable authority, insurmountable ethical problems, irresolvable contradiction and paradox. No good can come from evil, and no virtue can come from vice.

Augustine wrote
Against Lies
in response to questions he had received from an ascetic named Consentius, who had taken an active role in combating a Spanish heretical group that had formed in the late fourth century around the teachings of Priscillian. Doctrinal errors aside, the Priscillianists had proven difficult to uproot because they found it perfectly acceptable to lie in order to protect and conceal their true beliefs. When questioned, Consentius explains, they happily shield themselves behind claims of an orthodox faith that they in no way accept. Consentius’s solution to such mendacity was simple—for the good of the Catholic Church, we must lie to the liars, we must pretend to be the very heretics we are trying to root out, for “in no other way can we discover the hidden wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing, secretly and seriously preying upon the flock of the Lord.”
³
Augustine would have none of Consentius’s tit-for-tat ethical reasoning, and
Against Lying
reads as a wholesale assault on dishonesty, dissimulation, and lies, not just in cases concerning the faith and the fight against heresy, but in every case, no matter what the circumstances, no matter what the repercussions.

Augustine understood how harsh his prohibition might seem to others. He understood the grief it might cause. Imagine unjust persecutors come pounding at your door seeking the location of an acquaintance, a friend you have hidden away under the floorboards, in a back room, or across town. Or perhaps you are a doctor tending a critically ill patient whose feeble system can no longer tolerate any tumult, neither trauma nor tragedy. “How is my son?” he asks, and you think about the news you just received concerning the boy’s death from the same accident that has left his father in such fragile shape. These may well be the sort of overbaked cases that philosophers love, but they trouble Augustine, and he writes movingly about them. “Because we are men and live among men,” he writes, “I confess that I am not yet in the number of those who are not troubled by compensatory sins. Often, in human affairs, human sympathy overcomes me and I am unable to resist” lying. Think what will happen if you choose to speak the truth in these cases. Your friend will suffer a horrible death at the hands of his enemies, or the patient will die from shock and sorrow even as people accuse you “of loving homicide as truth.”
⁴
All this might be true, Augustine admits, but such considerations are irrelevant before God, who is the final arbiter of our virtue and of our salvation, and it is God himself who has declared every lie to be a sin and demanded that every sin must be avoided.