The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (18 page)

Not everyone agreed with Augustine, but their disagreements had little traction. Augustine’s contemporary Jerome, famous for his Latin translation of scripture, believed the Bible did in fact authorize the use of dissimulation and deception to help secure the salvation of nonbelievers. Hadn’t Paul supported such beneficial trickery when he wrote to the Corinthians, “To the Jews I became a Jew so as to win the Jews”?
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And, in a nod to the enduring tradition of the Devil’s mousetrap, Jerome notes that Jesus himself practiced dissimulation when he hid his divinity within human flesh. Despite his own fondness for the mousetrap, Augustine rejected Jerome’s arguments in a series of forceful and uncompromising letters and, with few (and entirely inconsequential) exceptions, the subsequent theological tradition sided with Augustine,
whose absolute prohibition against lies quickly became something of a commonplace.
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The sixth-century Spanish bishop and encyclopedist Isidore of Seville concurred with him, as did Gregory the Great. In the twelfth century, Peter Lombard made Augustine’s prohibition the centerpiece of his own analysis of lying, which itself was part of his more general analysis of the Ten Commandments in the third book of his
Sentences
.
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After Peter, no aspiring theologian, from the Franciscan Alexander of Hales in the early thirteenth century to the Dominicans Gabriel Biel and Antoninus of Florence in the fifteenth century, not mention such influential sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers as Domingo de Soto, Thomas Cajetan, Juan Azor, and Francisco Suarez, failed to rehearse and endorse Augustine’s opinion that every lie is a sin. Given the near-universal assent that theologians gave to Augustine’s prohibition, it is not at all surprising that when, in the early seventeenth century, the Englishman John Downame took up the cause in his aptly named essay,
A Treatise Against Lying
, he happily relied again and again on Augustine’s enduring treatise
Against Lies
.
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Yet despite almost unanimous acceptance of Augustine’s prohibition, the Catholic theological discussion about lies and deception outraged Henry Hammond and proved ripe for Pascal’s satire. Perhaps Jesuit theologians condemned all lies as sinful, but they had accomplished this (so their critics would argue) through verbal tricks, tendentious redefinitions, and willful obfuscation. As evidence of their mendacity, Hammond cites the Jesuit support of such suspect techniques of subterfuge as “Equivocation, mental restrictions [and] shifting and direction of the Intention.”
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Pascal would consider all these techniques in the ninth of his
Provincial Letters
. Written under the guise of the country gentleman Louis de Montalte, Pascal’s letters purport to record a series of discussions with an enthusiastic Jesuit all too convinced of the brilliance of his order’s novel moral teachings. The ninth letter takes up the theme of alleged Jesuit laxity as Montalte’s interlocutor runs through some of the “very easy, very sure and quite numerous” means the Jesuits employ to secure their salvation.
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Having discoursed on a
variety of topics, including how to eat well during fasts and the virtues of self-centered complacency, he turns to some of the “methods we have developed in order to avoid sin in worldly conversation and intrigues.” How, for example, can a good Christian avoid lying in situations where telling the truth might be inconvenient? There is, of course, the tried-and-true method of equivocation, the use of ambiguous words that we know our listeners will understand one way, but which we understand differently. Useful as it is, this method has its limits because sometimes there are no equivocal words appropriate to the situation. In such cases, the Jesuits offer the strategy of mental reservation. Pascal’s interlocutor explains, quoting from the writings of the late sixteenth-century Jesuit theologian Thomas Sanchez: “A man can swear that he did not do something, even if he really did it, understanding to himself that he did not do it on a certain day, or before he was born, or under similar conditions, without his actual words having any indication that this is what he means.”
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Shocked, Montalte interjects that this practice sounds like little more than sheer lying and perjury. The Jesuit disagrees. It is intention, he explains, that determines the moral quality of our actions, and if we intend our spoken words to mean something different than our listeners will take them to mean, so much the worse for them. When we employ the technique of mental reservation, we intend that our spoken words (false when considered on their own) are part of a larger statement, a statement made true by the addition of those unheard words. Of course, this complex balancing act between public statement and careful qualifying thought can be difficult to achieve and, perhaps, may even be beyond the ability of most people. The Jesuit admits this and happily announces that his order has even found a way for less talented people to make use of the technique of mental reservation. The less able can confidently go ahead and assert that they have not done things they have done so long as they silently include “the general intention to give their words the sense that a capable man would have given them.” Enthralled with his order’s ingenuity, the Jesuit asks, “Be candid now and confess, if you have not often felt
yourself embarrassed, in consequence of not knowing this?” Montalte can do little else but respond, “Sometimes.”
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Vitriol is one thing, analysis another, and parody, however effective, is not the same as argument. While Pascal’s
Letters
would forever tarnish the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholic theological discourse concerning truth-telling and lies, they did so at the expense of ignoring the internal tensions that had fueled that discourse and the external forces that had shaped it. Augustine had declared every lie a sin, and the theologians followed suit, only to discover the suit did not fit as well they had hoped or needed. Caught between the demands of theology and the challenges of the world, theologians sought a middle ground, both wholly Catholic and wholly useful, recognizing both the absolute demands of faith and the vagaries of life in a fallen and maddeningly complex world. For Pascal, the very desire to accommodate marked the essence of our spiritual misery, a misery so deep that, in the end, even he could not entirely escape it.

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In
Against Lying
, his letter to Consentius, Augustine repeatedly invokes consequentialist arguments in favor of his prohibition against lying. Consentius must not lie to uncover deceitful heretics, because lies never achieve the good ends we intend. If we lie to people who already lie to hide their faith, aren’t we teaching them that lies are acceptable and, in the long run, making it that much harder to identify and convert them? If they believe our lies, won’t we only confirm them in their heresy? If they discover we are lying, why should they ever trust anything we say? Our lies can only backfire on us.
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No doubt Augustine took these arguments seriously, but the real basis for his prohibition against lies had little to with outcomes and everything to do with our relationship to God, to the Word, and to the Word made flesh in the incarnation of Christ.

Both stoic ideas and scripture shaped Augustine’s philosophy and theology of the Word and of language. From the Stoics, Augustine drew on and then modified a distinction between words
and meaning.
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In one of his sermons on the Gospel of John, for example, Augustine asks his audience to look within themselves, to observe their own hearts, and to watch how language works. Augustine’s reliance on visual metaphors is intentional. Before we speak, Augustine suggests, we have a thought, something we wish to express, an inner word or concept already present in our heart and “waiting to be uttered.” This inner word is immaterial, preexists all languages, and is something we discover already within us when we look within ourselves using the eyes of our heart. Vision requires light, and just as the sun makes things in the world visible to us, so God illuminates these hidden contents of our mind, Augustine argues, which are “confined by no language” but make all language possible. The inner word is neither Latin nor Greek, but if we are Roman, we will express it in Latin and, if we are Greek, we will express it in Greek. Nor should we confuse this inner word with the silent thoughts or hymns that “run through our mind.” When we quietly think things to ourselves, we use the same language that we use to express ourselves to others, a language that exists and changes over time. The inner word, by contrast, is the unchanging truth, the concept, the idea that we seek to express whenever we speak. Words, in effect, are “significant sounds” whose meaning derives from and depends on the truth of the inner word made known to us through divine illumination.
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For Augustine, the dependence of language on the inner word shapes the ethical demands of all discourse. If verbal signs signify mental concepts, then, Augustine reasons, they exist for the sake of correctly expressing our inner states and ideas to others. “There is no reason for us to signify something,” Augustine writes in
On Christian Doctrine
, “that is, to give a sign, except to express and transmit to another’s mind what is in the mind of the person who gives the sign.”
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While Augustine believed the subordination of language to inner word indicated that our spoken words be truthful, it was scripture that transformed this linguistic insight into a criterion of moral and spiritual rightness. In the Gospel of John, the evangelist describes the entire history of salvation as a series of speech acts. “In the beginning was the Word,” the evangelist
proclaims in the opening lines of his gospel, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John the Baptist, “a man sent from God,” testifies to the coming of “the true light” and, in good order, that true light appears when “the Word became flesh and lived among us … as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”
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Augustine asserts that the movement from God to Word and from Word to Word made flesh both clarified and was clarified by the structure of human language, which moves from illuminated inner word to language. “The Father,” Augustine explains, “as though uttering Himself, begot the Word, equal in all things to Himself. For He would not have uttered Himself completely and perfectly, if there were anything less or more in His Word than Himself…. And therefore this Word is truly Truth, since whatever is in that knowledge from which it was born is also in the Word.”
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The Father’s speech begets the Word, Augustine contends, and the Word’s own speech produces the incarnation. “For just as our word in some way becomes bodily sound by assuming that in which it may be manifested to the senses of men,” he writes, “so the Word of God was made flesh by assuming that in which he might also be manifested to the sight of men.”
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On this reading of scripture, language provides an explanatory model for all action, divine and human. “The beginning of every work is the word,” Augustine notes, and just as God made all things through “His only-begotten word, so there are no works of man which are not first spoken in the heart.” Our gestures and actions, no less than our spoken words, signify the inner word and its eternal truth, and whether or not we choose to embody and obey that truth reveals our own relation to Christ, who is the Word embodied. “The Son alone,” Augustine writes, “who is the word of God, was made flesh … in order that by our word following and imitating His example, we might live rightly, that is, that we might have no lie either in the contemplation or in the work of our word.”
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Every lie is a sin because, fundamentally, every sin is a lie, every sin takes the form of false signification. Every sin is a lie because sin is nothing but a turning from and rejection of the truth, a refusal to signify and express it, to speak it, in our lives. Like the
snake whose motions depend on “the most minute movement of its scales,” this rejection begins subtly and imperceptibly as we slowly slip away from the good “with the perverse desire of becoming like God.” Augustine’s allusion to the snake recalls Adam and Eve, whose transgression, he believed, made sense only if they had already inwardly turned from God’s Word, preferring to follow their private passions and pleasures rather than obey God’s command.
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It is this fear of the subtle and unperceived turn from God that gives force to Augustine’s prohibition against all lies, against all false assertion. When we choose to sin, to lie, even if we sin and lie for the good, for the greatest good, we set ourselves up as arbiters of good and evil, we imagine ourselves to be like God, and the consequences of that error are all too obvious. “When a man lives according to truth,” Augustine writes in
The City of God
, “then, he lives not according to self, but according to God; for it is God Who has said, ‘I am the truth.’ When he lives according to self, however,—that is, according to man, and not according to God—he then certainly lives according falsehood.” In this turn from God, we imitate the Devil, who chose to live according to himself rather than abide in the truth. And, as Augustine is only too eager to remind his readers, “The devil is not only a liar, he is ‘the father of lies’: he was, indeed, the first to lie, and falsehood, like sin, began with him.”
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Just as Augustine’s prohibition against lies flows from his conception of God, so too does his definition of what it means to lie. In
On Lying
, a treatise he had written some twenty-five years before
Against Lying
, Augustine writes that the liar is a person “who has one thing in his mind but expresses something else with words or any other sort of indication.” We lie when we embody falsity in words or in deeds and, in so doing, disrupt our likeness to God, who is Truth, and the Son, who is the full and total embodiment of that truth. According to this definition, the objective truth or falsity of what the liar says is irrelevant. We lie whenever we intend to assert what is false, whenever we keep one thing in our heart but say something else. We can even lie when we speak the truth, so
long as we believe what we are saying is false. At times though, Augustine offers a slightly different definition of the lie. “The fault of the person who tells a lie,” Augustine continues, “consists in his desire to deceive in expressing his thought.”
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In
Against Lying
, Augustine would frame this conception of the lie in the form that John Downame still repeated as definitive in the seventeenth century: “A lie is a false signification made with a will to deceive.”
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According to this second and admittedly more influential definition, the liar intends two things, both to state what is false and to deceive his listener.