The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (20 page)

And it is precisely the lie’s perfection, according to Thomas, that determines its severity. Adopting Augustine’s division of the sin of lying into three categories and eight types, Thomas contends that lies committed in the spirit of harm, lies against charity, are more grievous than those committed for the good. Lies told against charity are mortal sins, whereas officious lies, lies told for the benefit of our neighbors, are merely venial. Augustine himself had suggested that malicious lies were more serious than beneficial or compensatory lies, but he had refused to pursue the matter, and this refusal speaks to his contention that lying is at the basis of all sin. When we sin, we turn from God and from the Truth as we mimic the Devil in his fatal descent into unlikeness. Augustine’s
two treatises on lying resonate with the emotional tension he suffers between the demand to love God and his occasional belief that a minor sin might save the life of a loved one. His anguish arises from the profound abyss that he believes every false assertion carves out between sinner and God. While Thomas is no less vociferous in his assertion that every lie is a sin, his decision to discuss the nature and severity of different kinds of lies, to separate them into mortal and venial sins, suggests a lessening of that tension that so tortured Augustine. Much of this derives from Thomas’s decision to annex truth to justice. When we lie, we offend against justice defined primarily in terms of our obligations to ourselves and others, and those violations are less severe when they entangle us in venial as opposed to mortal sins. Augustine had considered the danger of lying entirely in terms of the liar’s relation to God. Thomas emphasizes the positive or negative consequences that our lies will have on others.
⁴⁴

Despite this, Thomas, in good Augustinian fashion, condemns all lies, even the most seemingly beneficial, as offenses against truth and justice, arguing that good cannot come from evil and virtue cannot come from vice. In the heat of the moment, when good options seem few and a simple false assertion might save the life of an innocent fugitive, the danger of a beneficial lie may well be invisible to us, but Thomas fears there is rot, perceived or not, at the base of such calculations. Left to themselves, the will and intellect have “no fixed limits,” Thomas contends, and can proceed indefinitely such that the individual who acts against justice one time, can do so again, “and the more the will tends to undue ends, the more difficult is it for it to return to its proper and due end.”
⁴⁵
Once we find reasons to act against truth and justice, it will be easier to find additional reasons, and soon irrationality will come to characterize all our actions as we endeavor to create justice from injustice. Commenting on Aristotle’s
Ethics
in the early fourteenth century, the University of Paris arts master John Buridan would express Thomas’s deepest fears with great clarity. While we might think it admirable to commit beneficial lies that achieve great goods, Buridan promises this can never be the case. With
every lie, the liar destroys his own soul, undermining his ability to make and act on rational judgments, to be human, as he fools himself into imagining that he can achieve good ends through depraved means. The prohibition against lies becomes something like the limit beyond which we risk the loss of our very humanity and undo the possibility of human society.
⁴⁶

Precept is one thing, elaboration another. When Thomas turns to those classic cases of apparent biblical deception—the Hebrew midwives, Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Isaac—he is compelled to stretch his concept of truthful discourse in surprising ways. In the case of Abraham, for example, Thomas notes the difference between “hiding the truth” and telling a lie, suggesting that Abraham did the former, not the latter. A little later in the same set of responses, however, Thomas pushes this line of thought a bit further when he notes that while “it is unlawful for anyone to lie in order to rescue another, no matter what the peril, one may, however, prudently mask the truth, as Augustine explains.”
⁴⁷
It is not at all clear that this is what Augustine explained, or at least had intended his readers to think he had explained. Perhaps Abraham’s claim that Sarah was his sister required this sort of justification in order to render it truthful, but Augustine never holds up the patriarch’s words as a model for his readers to follow. When difficult choices must be made, he much prefers the example of the bishop Firmus’s resolute devotion to truth, maintained despite torture at the hands of Roman prosecutors, to Abraham’s coy dissimulations. For Thomas, by contrast, Abraham’s concealment is perfectly acceptable, not just for the Old Testament patriarchs, but for all of us.
⁴⁸

This alteration to Augustine’s standards, however muted in Thomas’s writings, becomes more evident in a line of thought that had already begun to develop among certain Franciscan writers. Pondering Jacob’s claim to be his brother Esau, Alexander of Hales, in the 1230s, considers a problem that Augustine himself had noticed, only to more or less pass over, when he suggests that it might well be objected that Jacob really had intended to persuade his father that he was Esau. Alexander meets the objection,
for all intents and purposes, by accepting it. “It ought to be said,” he writes, “that given the circumstances, Jacob may have intended this, but principally he intended to claim for himself his due benediction; his statement was therefore simply true.”
⁴⁹
Alexander invokes something like a hierarchy of intentions. Jacob primarily intended his words and actions to signify at the allegorical or figurative level. In order to accomplish this allegorical signification, it was necessary, given the specific circumstances in which he found himself, for Jacob to speak and act in ways he knew would deceive his father. Whereas Augustine simply ignored the more practical implications of Jacob’s performance, Alexander suggests that they cannot be ignored. Given the communicative context in which Jacob speaks, the meaning of his words, the expectations of his audience, Jacob’s actions are deceptive. It is his primary intention to signify figurative truth, an intention known only to Jacob, that renders that intended deception something less than sheer lying.

Alexander’s willingness to complicate Jacob’s speech act, to recognize the multiple interpretive contexts it inhabits and intentions it contains, combined with his very Augustinian stance against lying, no doubt plays a part in his distinction between words and deeds. Repeating and affirming Augustine’s definition that a lie is a false statement made with the intention of deceiving someone, Alexander adds, in a decidedly non-Augustinian move, that this definition does not strictly apply to deeds. Unlike words, actions are not instituted for the sole purpose of communication, for revealing to others what is in our minds, and as a result there is some leeway in how we can use them to communicate.
⁵⁰
Alexander contends that there are three categories of praiseworthy simulations, that is, types of actions in which a person, without incurring guilt, without lying, can pretend to be someone he is not or pretend to do something he does not intend to do. Citing the usual array of biblical examples, he defines these as prudent, instructive, and figurative deceptions. Jehu, for example, engaged in prudent deception when he pretended to be a member of the cult of Baal so that he could kill their priests.
⁵¹
Jesus, by contrast, engaged in instructive deception when he pretended to continue walking when
he and his disciples had reached the village that was their destination. He was, Alexander explains, teaching them about the importance of deeds of mercy and hospitality. Finally, when he donned goatskin and stated, “I am Esau your firstborn,” Jacob did not lie so much as engage in a figurative deception. In each case, the action is laudable because of the overarching intention and goal, to instruct or to signify a spiritual truth.
⁵²
Regardless, the immediate action with its potentially deceptive aspects remains.

Another Franciscan, Duns Scotus, writing in the early 1300s, would extend the importance of intention in his own
Sentence
commentary. Accepting the Augustinian standard that all lies are sinful, Scotus asks why. Following his fellow Franciscan Bonaventure, Scotus argues that the sinfulness of lies cannot rest in the alleged fact that every lie turns us from God. Lies, Scotus contends, are not “immediately opposed to the first truth, but to the truth of some particular thing one is talking about.” Scotus next considers and rejects what he understands (incorrectly) to be Thomas’s argument that lies are necessarily sinful because they misuse language. Appealing to the divine omnipotence, Scotus argues that if God so chose, he could revoke the commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” in which case we could blamelessly kill others. Scotus considers the example of Abraham and Isaac. God ordered Abraham to kill Isaac, and had Abraham followed through on this command (as he intended), his action would have been meritorious. If God can render murder virtuous, Scotus reasons, then he can certainly allow licit lies, “for the precept of not deceiving is not more binding than the precept of not killing—indeed one’s neighbor loses less if occasionally given a false view … than he would if deprived of bodily life, in fact, there is no comparison here.”
⁵³

If the sinfulness of lies does not rest in a misuse of language, Scotus argues, it must rest entirely in the liar’s intention to deceive. To prove his point, he analyzes the lie into its component parts. The word “lie,” he explains, refers to the conjunction between a certain act and its “malice” or “deformity.” He clarifies this claim through comparisons with adultery and theft. Adultery does not simply name the act of “natural copulation,” which on its own can
be sinless, “but also the impropriety that it is not done with one’s own spouse.” Likewise, there are circumstances in which it is perfectly legitimate to take another’s property. “Theft” names the act of taking property illegally and against the owner’s will.
⁵⁴
By extension, we lie when we make a false assertion with the intent of deceiving someone. It is the evil intention that deforms the false assertion and transforms it into sin.

The consequences of Scotus’s subtle interpretive shift, his exclusive emphasis on bad will and evil intention, show up in his handling of those now well-trod biblical examples. Considering the case of the Hebrew midwives, Scotus first offers as “probable” an interpretation that extends at least as far back as Augustine’s
Against Lying
and that had been more or less repeated verbatim ever since. The midwives did in fact lie, and because that sin precluded an eternal reward, God granted them a temporal one for their charity. Significantly, Scotus then proceeds to what he believes to be an even more probable interpretation. “One could say,” he writes, “that theirs was a polite lie, because it was useful in saving the Jewish children and harmed no one. Therefore, God would have rewarded their motives and good will and would still not have denied them eternal life, since their sin was only venial.”
⁵⁵
In other words, Scotus’s emphasis on will and intention enables him to enter even more fully than Thomas into the very sort of moral calculating that Augustine had been so keen to avoid.

With the case of the midwives in mind, Scotus immediately asks whether “because of a powerful motive of charity” one should commit a venial sin, tell a venial lie. For Scotus, it is no longer simply a question of the gravity of our charitable lies but rather our duty, should the circumstances warrant it, to sin to avoid sin. Although he chooses to postpone a full examination of the problem, Scotus’s own position is clear: “Since such an evil is of itself not eternal but temporal,” he concludes, “it does not seem one ought to omit something which of itself is the cause in some way of an eternal good.”
⁵⁶
Perhaps every lie is a sin—indeed, Scotus is clear about this, as clear as Thomas, Alexander, and Augustine were
before him—but that does not prevent him from sometimes recognizing the need and even the reward for telling them.

Augustine would have sympathized with Scotus’s dilemma, even if he would have condemned Scotus’s final position. Augustine, no less than the Scholastics, understood that we live in a world full of entanglements, dilemmas, and confusions, a world in which a simple lie might often seem like the only means to achieve the good. His two treatises against lying repeatedly stress how harsh, unfair, and cruel his exceptionless ban against lying might at times appear. For all that, Augustine feared nothing was more cruel to ourselves and to others than violating our duty to God. When we lie, for whatever reason, we embody falsity in our refusal to honor our image and likeness to God, who is truth, and to Christ, who suffered death as the incarnation of God’s true Word. No temporal reward, no worldly good or beneficial outcome can make good the sinner’s rejection of God’s infinite love and truth. The divide between truth and falsity, likeness and unlikeness, is absolute, and not even the best of intentions can do anything to bridge it. By contrast, even as they clung to his absolute prohibition against lies, Augustine’s Scholastic readers repeatedly considered the forms our lies can take. Why we lie matters even though we must never lie.

The consequences of this moral predicament show up quite clearly in the thirteenth-century Dominican theologian Albert the Great’s influential commentary on Aristotle’s
Ethics
. At one point, Albert asks whether one could lie to prevent a great harm from befalling the state.
⁵⁷
Albert opts to investigate the problem from two different perspectives, the political and civil, on the one hand, the spiritual and theological, on the other. This division foreshadows Thomas’s decision to annex truth to justice and to analyze lies in terms of what we owe others. From the perspective of civil virtue, Albert writes, which is ordered toward the temporal and finite good of the state, opposed courses of action can be compared, their respective outcomes and benefits weighed. At least in certain cases, intention and outcome will determine an action’s moral status. If a person lies to protect the state from some great harm, considered politically, the lie is not evil at all and might even be
virtuous. According to the perfection of political virtue, Albert concludes, a person can occasionally stoop to mendacity and can sometimes “lie in words or in deed, namely, he can present himself as something other than he is, other than as things really are.” From the perspective of theological virtue, which is ordered toward an infinite good, an entirely different rule applies. Considered theologically, Albert argues, one ought never lie because no temporal advantage can ever outweigh or even be commensurable with the infinite goodness of salvation.
⁵⁸