The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (2 page)

The Devil Wins

I
NTRODUCTION

Is It Ever Acceptable to Lie?

Punishment awaits those who lie.

Dante had little doubt about this, little doubt that unrepentant liars would suffer an eternity of pain, and he devoted much of his early fourteenth-century masterpiece, the
Inferno
, to describing their torments. As the pilgrim Dante and his guide, the revered Roman poet Virgil, enter the eighth circle of hell, a place called Malebolge, the final, painful residence for the fraudulent and every type of falsifier, they witness flatterers stewing in dung “that might well have been flushed from our latrines” and seducers condemned for eternity to walk naked in endless circles as “horned demons with enormous whips” beat them from behind. Pausing for a moment, Virgil asks his companion to look at one of the figures, a disheveled woman wallowing in excrement, squatting then standing then squatting again, forever scratching herself raw with filth-encrusted fingernails. “It is Thaïs,” Virgil explains, “the whore who gave this answer to her lover when he asked, ‘Am I very worthy of your thanks?’: ‘Very, nay, incredibly so!’ ” Disgusted, Virgil urges his companion to hurry on: “I think our eyes have had their fill of this.”
¹
Perhaps they have seen more than enough seducers and flatterers, but the variety of deceivers and falsifiers proves limitless. As the two continue farther into the depths of Malebolge, they discover hypocrites struggling under the weight of gold-gilded iron robes, false counselors transformed into heatless flame, a frozen
lake filled with traitors submerged to their bellies, their teeth chattering “notes like storks’ beaks snapping shut.”
²

A journey through hell, Dante’s
Inferno
maps a geography of sin. Though all in hell are guilty, all are not equally punished. The gravity of sin increases the deeper Virgil and the pilgrim descend. Sinners guilty of lust and gluttony, avarice and prodigality, wrath and sullenness, give way to the violent, to murderers and suicides. But worst of all are the fraudulent, all those liars, deceivers, and traitors that fill hell’s final two circles. “Since fraud belongs exclusively to man,” Virgil explains, “God hates it more and, therefore, far below, the fraudulent are placed and suffer most.”
³
Those guilty of lust allowed their passions to overwhelm them, like the winds that batter them in hell’s upper reaches, catching them in storms of desire that lay waste to reason. Though their crimes were worse, the same is true of the malicious, of murderers condemned to cook in boiling rivers of blood as fitting justice for the burning rage and greed they let go unchecked, clouding all sense of charity as it drove them toward homicide. Traitors are different. Condemned to suffer forevermore in the arctic depths of hell, they composed their deceitful words with cold calculation, sundering every bond of love and friendship, like Judas before Jesus. When asked if he was the one who would betray the Son of Man, Judas calmly replied, “Surely, not I?”
⁴

The denizens of hell not only suffer, their suffering poses a challenge to the two travelers. Forever trapped in forms and punishments emblematic of their crimes, the damned are forever doomed to repeat them. Well inside the eighth circle of hell, Virgil and the pilgrim discover that a bridge they had hoped to cross now lies in rubble. When Virgil questions a nearby demon, the creature promises that there are other bridges still standing farther along the path. Although the pilgrim warns his leader to be wary of this information, Virgil accepts it as true, only to discover later that every bridge has collapsed. “Once, in Bologna, I heard discussed the devil’s many vices,” a nearby hypocrite snidely comments. “[O]ne of them is that he tells lies and is the father of all lies.” Virgil stalks off, angry with himself for having been fooled.
⁵

If Virgil proves occasionally too trusting, the pilgrim responds differently to hell’s challenges. Now in the ninth and final circle of hell, the abode of traitors, Virgil and the pilgrim come across a soul who refuses to name himself, frozen in place, his head bent back with tears turned to pools of ice so that “weeping puts an end to weeping, and the grief that finds no outlet from the eyes turns inward to intensify the anguish.” Blinded and believing the pilgrim to be dead and damned just like himself, the frozen figure cries out, “O wicked souls, so wicked that you have been assigned the ultimate post, break off these hard veils covering my eyes and give relief from the pain that swells my heart—at least until the new tears freeze again.” The pilgrim, doing nothing to correct the suffering soul’s mistake, makes a promise: “If you wish me to help you, tell me who you are, and if I do not extricate you, may I have to go down to the bottom of the ice.” These are misleading words at best, no doubt deceitful, perhaps even dishonest. With Virgil as his guide, the pilgrim knows he will soon descend to the bottom of the ice, the very pit and nadir of hell, fulfilling in some sense the strict letter of his promise, if not its spirit, and certainly not the promise as the soul understands it. Deceived, the soul immediately reveals himself to be Alberigo, a man whose treachery is so great his soul already suffers in hell while his body remains on earth inhabited by a shade. His crime? Under the false pretense of a reconciliation with relatives, he invited them to dine at his house, where he gleefully watched hired hands slaughter them as they ate. “But now extend your hand and open my eyes for me,” the soul cries out. “I did not open them,” the pilgrim reports. “To be mean to him was a generous reward.”
⁶

If cruelty can become generosity, can lies ever become virtuous?

This is a book about the history of lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment. With one notable exception, it is not a history of specific lies, of who said what to whom, but a history of responses to a very fundamental, if straightforward, question:
Is it
ever acceptable to lie?
A perennial question, one that remains with us to this day, it no longer means for us what it meant for people who lived during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Reformation. Contemporary behavioral psychologists and evolutionary biologists tell us that deception is woven into the very fabric of nature. Plants have evolved to look like insects and insects to look like plants. The bolas spider can emit a scent so similar to that of a female moth that it lures males to their death. For their part, different sorts of baboons, gorillas, and chimpanzees engage in what can best be described as intentional acts of deception, purposefully leading their fellows away from banana-laden trees only to scurry back unseen to gorge themselves, alone and in peace.
⁷
We humans are little different, and evolution seems to have favored those of us who deceive better than others. If we don’t lie constantly, we certainly lie frequently. One study suggests that during every ten minutes of conversation, we lie three times and even more frequently when we use e-mail and text messaging.
⁸
Contemporary philosophers may debate whether it is ethical to lie, whether the standards and expectations of human society and conduct allow for or prohibit dishonesty, but these debates simply assume that lying is one of many questionable things we do.
⁹

No one living before the eighteenth century would ever have claimed that our penchant for lying was simply natural. Scripture may have famously proclaimed “Every man is a liar,” but that was an observation rooted in much more than mere empirical analysis. Near the beginning of his meditative treatise
On Humility and Pride
, Bernard of Clairvaux, perhaps the most famous religious figure of the twelfth century, writes that we can understand what it means to be a liar only if we humble and humiliate ourselves before God’s truth and in that humiliation experience how wretched we really are. Reflecting on the book of Psalms, Bernard writes: “The prophet has humbled himself […] as he says in another Psalm, ‘And in your truth you have humbled me.’ He has been thinking about himself. Now he looks from his own wretchedness to that of others, and so passes to the second step, saying in his ecstasy, ‘Every man is a liar.’ ” But what does it mean to say “Every
man is a liar?” It means, Bernard continues, that “every man is weak, powerless, unable to save himself or others.” It means that anyone “who trusts his own strength deceives himself … [for] … he cannot hope for salvation from himself, nor can anyone else hope for salvation from him.”
¹⁰
To assert that every man is a liar is to say something profound about who we are and how we got to be this way, about our relationship to God and ourselves, to those around us and to the world itself. Every man is a liar because every man is fallen, cast out of paradise, full of pride and utterly at God’s mercy.

While Bernard’s deeply monastic and religiously severe assessment of human depravity and helplessness may have been more extreme than those of his nonreligious peers, Christian writers from the earliest days of the Church to the seventeenth-century writings of Blaise Pascal, John Milton, and beyond would have agreed with him that the problem of the lie, of lying, was the problem of human existence itself. Its roots dug deep into the ground of ontology, metaphysics, and theology, and reached as far back as the very first moments of human history, a history blasphemed into existence beneath a tree in a garden, in the serpent’s lying words to a woman who would soon be named Eve. For this tradition, human history, the history of fallen man, began with the serpent’s lie, and that lie shaped and marked us, deformed and weakened us. It transformed us into sons of the Devil, liars and sinners both, even as it entangled us ever more tightly in the misery of a life lived in exile from the earthly paradise that God had created for us. Given this history, with all it entailed, the question
Is it ever acceptable to lie?
was always more than a question about acceptable or unacceptable behavior. It rephrased in the most trenchant form possible a much broader question:
How should we live in a fallen world?
Should the faithful Christian, when need be, adapt to the ways of a corrupt and deceitful world, lie to the liars, or is such accommodation the very hallmark and sign, root cause and continuing symptom, of our miserable lives as sinners? This account of the human penchant for perversity would begin to unravel, perhaps already in the seventeenth century but certainly in the next, a
development most obvious in the writings of the French
philosophe
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who would look to society as the entirely this-worldly source of human corruption and deceit.

From the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment, from the serpent to society, at least one of the questions this book hopes to answer is how lying became a natural phenomenon, how religiously inspired accounts of human mendacity slowly gave way to accounts that had nothing to do with either God or the Devil. Human beings would remain liars forever after, but there would no longer be anything divine or damned in that fact. The Devil’s greatest victory, even if it meant his own self-annihilation, was to set in motion the long slow process that would one day make a corrupted world seem like the world God had meant to create all along.