The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (21 page)

Theological concerns ultimately trump the political, and Albert, following tradition, asserts that every lie is a sin and must be avoided, but the drift from Augustine’s Christological rejection of lies cannot be denied. For Albert and Thomas, for Bonaventure and Scotus, for the entire subsequent theological tradition, lies were no longer understood as always and necessarily opposed to God. Rather, they were merely one of the many evils that plague this fallen world, worse than some, better than others. Bonaventure gives voice to this Scholastic development in his commentary on Peter Lombard’s
Sentences
when he attempts to explain why every lie is a sin and begins with a contrast between lies that oppose created truth (lies about the things and people that populate this world) and those that oppose the uncreated truth (lies about God and the faith). The distinction between these two types of lies, Bonaventure contends, might seem to hold open the prospect that in some possible world lies against created truths could be virtuous. In language that would later influence Scotus, Bonaventure argues, “If God, therefore, can dispense with his commandments [as he did in the case of Abraham and Isaac] so that someone can destroy a created good … it would seem he could act similarly with regard to created truth.” Bonaventure allows this reasoning to stand, only later to locate the intrinsic and essential sinfulness of lying in the “intention to deceive.”
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The thirteenth-century distinction between lies against God and lies against creation reflects a much broader transformation in Scholastic thought, a transformation at least partly dependent on the unique institutional and religious setting in which
thirteenth-century intellectuals found themselves. If, to borrow Albert’s terminology, Augustine had believed there was only one frame within which to evaluate our actions, Scholastic writers discovered an alternative frame: the civil, the political, the secular—the world itself. Nowhere is the conceptual novelty of this development made clearer than early in Thomas’s
Summa of Theology
, when, as part of his investigation into the nature of truth, he asks whether “there is only one truth according to which all things are true?” As Thomas himself notes, the Benedictine monk Anselm of Bec had asked the very same question nearly two hundred years earlier, determining that “there is only one truth by which all things are true.” While Thomas does not entirely disagree with Anselm, he believes that Anselm does not consider the question from all sides.
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Anselm addresses the problem in
On Truth
, a work he composed in the 1080s in the form of a dialogue between a younger monk and his teacher. Anselm argues that there is only one truth by which all things are true and that truth is determined entirely through each thing’s relationship with God. Much like Augustine before him, Anselm begins with language and then extends his analysis to encompass the truth of all natural things, of all human action. Just as statements are true when they assert that what is is, that is, when they do what they ought to do, natural things signify truly when they do what they ought to do. Fire, Anselm offers by way of example, does what it ought to do, signifies truly, when it heats other objects. Rational beings differ from nonrational beings because rational beings choose to act as they do, that is, they can choose to do or not do what they ought to do.
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Anselm then rephrases his initial question to bring out the moral, ethical, and ultimately the theological dimensions of true signification and action. Since truth is nothing but doing what ought to be done, it is the same as rendering what is owed, what ought to be repaid.
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Truth, accordingly, falls under the category of rightness and rectitude, of acting correctly. Asking “[w]hether there is only one or many truths in all things which we say are true” is the same as
asking if there is one or many rightnesses by which all action is judged to be correct. For Anselm the answer to that question is unambiguous—there is only one such rightness, and it is God. Rectitude names a single and universal demand that all natures act as they ought to act, that they be true, and the truth and rightness of all created natures is nothing but their indebtedness to the Supreme Truth, God, who is the single truth of all beings and is himself indebted to nothing. Failure to maintain one’s right relation to God, to exist in the truth, to exist with rectitude, is a moral failure that incurs immediate guilt against the infinite.
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Thomas never denies that in a primary sense all things are true only insofar as they are conformed to the divine truth—“And this is the truth of which Anselm speaks,” Thomas writes in his
Disputed Questions on Truth
—but, he adds, in a secondary sense, truth can also be predicated of the human intellect, insofar as it is able to know created things.
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By this, Thomas does not mean that there can be truths about the world, philosophical truths, that contradict the truths of faith. In fact, he argued strenuously against arts masters Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, who held such positions. Rather, he means that something can also be called true if it is knowable to the human intellect, if “it is such as to cause a true estimate of itself.” In this sense, Thomas explains, there are “many truths about many true things and even many truths in many minds about one true thing.”
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It might seem as if there is no disagreement here between the two writers. Anselm certainly recognizes a sense in which there are many truths. Spoken affirmations, he notes, are said to be true when we assert them correctly (when, for example, we say, “It is day” during the daytime).
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Anselm, however, quickly adds that “truth is improperly said to be ‘of this thing’ or ‘of that thing.’ For truth does not have its being
in
or
from
or
through
the things in which it is said to be.” There is only one truth, one rightness, the Supreme Truth, and created things are called true when they accord with that one absolute and unchanging standard.
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By contrast, Thomas contends there is a legitimate and proper, if secondary, sense in which things in this
world can be called true, are true—when, for example, we know them for what they are. It is precisely this difference between truths and Truth, Thomas argues, that distinguishes philosophy from theology. The philosopher considers the characteristics that belong to things according to their nature—the upward tendency of fire, for example. The theologian considers things only in terms of their relation to God.
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Later Thomists, such as the early sixteenth-century Italian cardinal Thomas Cajetan, would radicalize the split between truths and Truth, introducing the notion of “pure nature” into Thomas’s thought. Natural things, even human beings, have natural ends wholly distinct from their supernatural ends in God. In the state of pure nature, they argued, human beings can only desire natural ends, and it is philosophy that reveals these independent and self-sufficient natural ends.
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While these distinctions are foreign to Thomas, they are latent in his division between truths and Truth, and that division (or variations on it) supports the Scholastic contention that not every lie is a lie against the first and uncreated truth. Some lies are about things in this world, created things—the good of the state, the whereabouts of an innocent fugitive—and these lies can be weighed and evaluated, judged to be mortal or merely venial. No longer immediately defined as an offense against the infinite God and the infinite good of salvation, the culpability of these lies depends on context and the liar’s intention to help or to harm. Scotus would push this line of thought far enough to speculate on the possible theological merit of our lies, but even he never denied, in the end, that every lie is a sin. Albert is no different, undercutting the implications of his division between the theological and the civil and concluding that no temporal benefit can outweigh the harm the soul suffers when we lie. Thomas’s discussion of truth mirrors these various analyses of deception. Having located a place for the philosophical examination of the world, he limits it. The desire for knowledge becomes mere curiosity and blameworthy unless it is ultimately referred to God, divine truth, divine mandate, and our final ends.
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I
NSTITUTIONAL
T
RANSFORMATIONS

Thomas may have argued that the theologian considers things only as they relate to God, but the practical demands of his position required he consider quite a few other things as well. These considerations did much to shape the Scholastic discourse concerning deception. This becomes clear if we return to Anselm, whose work everywhere reflects its origins in the daily life of the monastery, in which every activity and every duty was always already understood (at least ideally) as an act of devotion to God, and this applied no less to studying, teaching, or working in the kitchen than it did to reciting the Psalter or attending mass. Anselm describes one of his works,
The Monologion
, as a meditation. For a monk, “to meditate” did not mean simply to reflect on and analyze an idea. It also had practical and moral connotations that encompassed more than just study. Meditation was a physical and spiritual activity involving the intelligence, the heart, and the tongue. The word
meditation
also named the first moment of contemplative prayer, the moment when the monk strove to conform himself to the text, to embody the prayer.
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Anselm explicitly joins together all these senses of meditation at the conclusion of the
Proslogion
, when he writes, “Meanwhile let my mind meditate upon it; let my tongue speak of it. Let my heart love it; let my mouth talk of it. Let my soul hunger for it; let my flesh thirst for it; let my whole being desire it, until I enter into your joy, Lord, who are ever the three and the one God, blessed forever and ever. Amen.” The
Proslogion
is both a speculative treatise and a prayer. Indeed, its speculative or philosophical aspects must not be disentangled from its overall setting as a prayer. It is a prayer even when it is speculative, and the act of speculation is the performance of a duty to pray, an act of piety and devotion, the repayment of a debt to God.
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The monastic setting not only lends form to Anselm’s writings (the dialogue, the prayer, the meditation) but even shapes their content. Since speculation is prayer, it always assumes the perspective of the monk’s immediate relation to God. No other
perspective ought to matter to the monk, whose life signifies truly and rightly only when it signifies its love of God. But this singleness of perspective is exactly what Thomas finds mistaken in Anselm’s theory of truth. Anselm, to hear Thomas tell it, lacks that perspective which contemplates the truth of created things independently of God and the first truth. If the institutional setting of the monastery itself organizes and shapes Anselm’s conception of truth, the university plays no less a role in shaping Scholastic conceptions of truth. Even though early governing statutes for the university at Paris borrowed from monastic ideals concerning the relation between virtue and study, the university would never have been mistaken for a monastery.
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Much of this had to do with the sheer size of the university and its charge to educate not only theologians but also future bureaucrats, arts masters, doctors, and lawyers. To accomplish this most effectively, standards needed to be set, pedagogy unified, and the various fields of study organized. This applied to the teaching of grammar and dialectic as much as it did to theology which, in the twelfth century, began to be treated as an academic discipline for the first time. Under these pressures, theology became a field of study, a body of knowledge to be mastered, and great effort was undertaken to create texts in systematic theology capable of “meeting the needs of professional theological education.”
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Thomas explicitly refers to these new educational demands in the prologue to the
Summa
, where he explains that his goal is to organize coherently and concisely all of theological science for the beginning student. In the context of the university, theology, indeed all fields of study, became bodies of knowledge to be learned and debated, mastered, refined, and extended. There is even linguistic evidence for this new conception of study. Over the course of the twelfth century, the term “speculation” (
speculatio
), which for monks like Anselm had implied a devotional exercise related to contemplation (
contemplatio
), came to refer to a teachable activity of the mind independent of religious emotion.
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It is at precisely this point that the institutional structure of the university appears to guide the content of Thomas’s thought. Once speculation is freed
from devotion and conceived as an activity detachable from prayer, it becomes possible to study things in themselves and not solely as they stand in relation to God, and so it becomes possible to consider the truths and lies of this world as they relate to the things of this world. Even the division of the university into different faculties, each with its own area of expertise and texts, set the stage for this reconceptualization of truth and deception. As early as the 1220s, masters in the faculty of arts claimed a certain autonomy from the theological faculty, the right to a philosophical and natural as opposed to theological and supernatural perspective. By institutionalizing the split between theology and the other faculties, the university institutionalized a system of studies practically demanding that, in some sense, things be considered outside their immediate relation to God.

While the institutional and pedagogical imperatives of the medieval university might provide some explanations for the conceptual distinctions at work in Scholastic discussions of truth and lies, they don’t explain why theologians almost inevitably used these distinctions as excuses to expand the limits of acceptable speech. No doubt one factor at play is the extremity of Augustine’s prohibition, an extremity that attracts and troubles even modern ethicists, not to mention Augustine himself.
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Another factor, more immediately relevant to the thirteenth century, was the moral and pastoral expectations that the mendicant religious orders placed on their members to live a life of witness in both word and deed. It was an obligation that brought problems concerning truth and falsity, appearance and reality, simulation and deception, to the foreground.
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University theologians not only experienced these anxieties in their role as preachers, but studied and wrote about them in numerous handbooks designed to assist their brothers. In his thirteenth-century guide
On the Formation of Novices
, for example, the Franciscan David of Augsburg gives voice to these concerns when he suggests that there will be times when even the best of novices must present a false front. “If you should lack interior devotion,” he writes, “at least humbly maintain discipline and a grave exterior demeanor out of reverence for God and as an
example to others.”
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No Scholastic theologian would have objected to this advice, would have judged such behavior to be deceitful, but it is worth noting that Scholastic discussions of lying almost inevitably conclude with discussions of hypocrisy, discussions themselves that almost inevitably focus on those who present themselves as holy while lascivious or at least lukewarm emotions stir within them. What exactly is the difference between laudable deception and vile hypocrisy?
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