The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (22 page)

These are concerns that move us to the very heart of mendicant life—to the public preacher with his duty, not merely to edify and instruct his audience, but also to move and excite them with the desire to confess. In this respect, the thirteenth-century Dominican Humbert of Romans’s
On the Formation of Preachers
is unique only because of its sustained examination of the preacher’s need to cultivate his public persona. Humbert makes it clear that the preacher must adapt his words and appearance to an ever-changing set of circumstances and audiences, while simultaneously maintaining a careful watch on his intentions. The preacher must make sure that the dramatic and rhetorical effects he deploys are never intended for self-glorification but only for the good of his listeners.
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Dominican and Franciscan training manuals and exempla indicate how difficult maintaining this balance could be. Writing in the fifteenth century, the Dominican Johannes Nider confronts the problem directly in his discussion of hypocrisy when he asks if a person sins who simulates sanctity to edify his neighbors. Clearly, Nider answers, a person who simulates holiness to win fame and renown sins, but consider a different case. Imagine a member of the church, a priest or mendicant who, when he preaches to the laity, pretends to be holier than he would ever dare pretend when with his fellow brothers. If he does this for the sake of more effectively edifying his audience, Nider reasons, not only does he not sin, but his actions are meritorious. Nider looks to the story of the bishop Diego, a friend of Dominic, the founder of Nider’s order, to support this bit of justified fakery. Disgusted at the pomp and pageantry of the abbots he met in 1206 in the south of France, Diego declared they would do a much better job of converting the
Albigensians if they presented themselves on foot and in blessed poverty, rather than on horseback and in fine clothes.
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While Diego meant this as both a bit of sound advice and a rebuke of ecclesiastics whose faith had gone tepid, there is no hint of critique or correction in Nider, merely permission to pretend to a sanctity one doesn’t possess, a simulation rendered virtuous through intent and calculated outcome.

E
QUIVOCATION
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ENTAL
R
ESERVATION
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AND
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MPHIBOLOGY

Thirteenth-century theologians bequeathed their successors a set of questions to be repeatedly pondered and answered. When is simulation and pretending acceptable, and when is it nothing but base duplicity? What distinguishes concealing the truth from fabricating its false likeness? Long-standing and unquestionable interpretations of scripture helped to generate these questions and to provide clues to their solution. Theologians knew that Jacob was not guilty of duplicity when he pretended to be his brother Esau and that Christ did not offend against truth when he pretended to walk past the village of Emmaus. They knew this, just as they also knew that Abraham did not lie when, asked if Sarah was his wife, he responded, “She is my sister.” Thanks to Augustine’s prohibition against lies, these interpretations of biblical narrative had achieved the status of exemplary facts in need of an explanation, and the entire Catholic theological discourse on lies and deception can be read as a vast exercise in abductive reasoning, a search for the most reasonable set of premises to support them.
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External pressures also shaped this search. As human beings, theologians experienced the challenges and dilemmas that the world posed to the religious and laity alike. As preachers, they experienced the complicated dialectic between performer and audience, between appearance and reality, between simulation and dissimulation. As institutionally sanctioned authorities, they were expected to reflect on all these topics, to offer advice and guidance. Even the sacraments could generate dilemmas about truth and
falsity. In sixteenth-century Spain this became strikingly obvious when the confessor’s duty to maintain the secrecy of sins heard in confession, an injunction already made clear in 1215 in the canons of Lateran IV, came into conflict with the Inquisition’s desire to root out and extinguish heresy. To what extent should priests protect secrets learned in confession? When pressed, could a confessor deny having heard what he in fact had heard in the private forum of confession? And there would be additional pressures, especially in the wake of the Reformation as Catholics and Protestants, persecuted and threatened with torture or death, wondered if they could, in deed and in act, pretend to beliefs they in no way accepted, publicly reject beliefs they privately held.
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The popular and influential fifteenth-century Florentine bishop Antoninus set the stage for much of what was to follow in his
Summa of Sacred Theology
. Reflecting on those ever-popular biblical examples, Antoninus offers a simple principle for distinguishing between sinful and sinless simulation. Our simulations and pretenses are sinful only when they signify nothing and are made up out of whole cloth. When they refer to something, an idea, a lesson, a sacred mystery, they are not lies but “figures of the truth.” Jacob’s claim to be his brother refers to the future favor that Christians will see in God’s eyes, and when Jesus pretends to walk past the village of Emmaus, he is figuring his future ascent into heaven.
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Nider, who was one of Antoninus’s contemporaries, would explain this distinction between simulations that refer to something and those that refer to nothing in terms of the difference between concealing and deceiving. Referencing Thomas Aquinas, Nider explains, “A person verbally lies when he signifies what is not, not when he is silent about what is, which is sometimes allowed.” By extension, Nider suggests that simulation is sinful when, through deeds, we signify something that is not, not if someone neglects to signify what is. “This is why,” Nider concludes, “a person can hide his sin without sin.”
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The existence of this hidden meaning, higher lesson, or invisible reference renders true what would otherwise be a lie.

With this principle in mind, fifteenth-century theologians began to explore the connections among words, contexts, and both the
speaker’s and listener’s intentions, between what others might take our words to mean and what we intend them to mean. Antoninus addresses these connections when he takes up the question of concealment. “It is sometimes licit to hide the truth when necessary,” he writes, “and this pertains to prudence.” Although he does not cite Thomas, his Dominican predecessor’s discussion of concealment during moments of peril clearly frames Antoninus’s explanation. Antoninus turns to the tried-and-true story of Abraham’s assertion that Sarah is his sister. Like previous theologians, Antoninus agrees that this is not a lie, because Sarah was both Abraham’s wife and half sister, but Antoninus takes the analysis a step further, deriving from it a rule for determining when our concealments are licit. “When there are many reasons for something, an agent, free from the vice of lying, can assign one of the lesser reasons, remaining silent about the others.” To explain this, Antoninus looks to the story of Samuel, whom the Lord sent to Bethlehem to announce that Isai’s youngest son David was to replace Saul as king of the Jews. When Samuel expresses concern that Saul would rather kill him than allow this news to be spread, the Lord advises Samuel to bring along a calf for Isai to sacrifice. Arriving at the gates of Bethlehem, calf in tow, and asked if he comes to the town peaceably, Samuel responds, “Peaceably, I am come to sacrifice to the Lord, sanctify yourselves and come with me to the sacrifice.” As Antoninus notes, Samuel does not lie. He simply conceals his principal reason for coming to town while offering up another true, but secondary, reason.
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Antoninus then adds that it is perfectly acceptable to employ sophistical words and equivocal expressions for the sake of countering evil. Specifically, Antoninus notes that we can take advantage of words with multiple meanings, using them so that our listeners will understand them one way while we understand them in another. If asked by persecutors whether a man they intend to kill passed this way, it is acceptable to respond, “He did not pass here,” by which we mean he did not pass over the very spot on which we stand. While this example clearly plays on the equivocal meaning of the word “here” in conjunction with an added mental
qualification specifying which meaning the speaker intends, Antoninus’s next example seems to do something more. A priest approaches the entrance to a city, and the gatekeeper asks whether he has money to pay the entrance fee. Although the priest has the money, he responds no. Antoninus contends that this is not a lie so long as the priest intends his response to mean, “I do not have the money in the sense that the religious are not obligated to pay such fees.” Although the priest intends this hidden meaning, Antoninus adds, he intends the gatekeeper to believe that he has no money whatsoever. To support this practice, Antoninus invokes the story of Tobit’s meeting with the angel Raphael, who had taken form of a beautiful young man. When Tobit asks who he is, Raphael responds that he is one of the children of Israel, Azarias son of Ananias. Much like Jacob before Isaac, Antoninus claims that Raphael’s words, literally false though they may be, are made true through the angel’s intention to speak figuratively, to give them a special meaning indicating his true identity as a glorious creature worthy of seeing and helping God.
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In cases like these, the line between licit simulation and sheer duplicity, between concealment and lying, becomes vanishingly fine, perhaps nonexistent. All of Antoninus’s methods of concealment depend on forms of mental reservation, the speaker’s silent specification of meaning, his intent that his words mean something other than what an ordinary listener would take them to mean. As Antoninus makes clear in his discussion of the priest at the city gates, the priest wants the gatekeeper to believe he has no money at all. This bit of misdirection is possible because of the difference between thought and speech, but that very difference implicates Antoninus’s technique in the very duplicity that defines the liar. Antoninus knows this well, as he makes clear early on in his discussion of lies, when he writes, “Where there is a doubleness of heart such that one says one thing and intends something else, there is a lie.” While it is possible that equivocal words (like “here”) might avoid the charge of speaking against one’s mind, it is much more difficult to make that argument in the case of the priest at the city gates. It becomes more difficult still when, following both
Bonaventure and Thomas, Antoninus locates the perfection of lying in the “intention of generating a false opinion in the listener” and several lines later defines duplicitous and sinful simulation as rooted in the intention to deceive.
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In these cases, there is every intention to deceive.

Although Antoninus seems oblivious to this potential inconsistency, he certainly recognizes the potential for these techniques to be abused, and he sets limits on their legitimate employment. We can equivocate to forestall evil, but we should never silently qualify our words (à la the priest at the gate) when such reservations will cause scandal if discovered or when a just judge questions us.
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Subsequent theologians would take a similar tack to avoid abuse. Sylvester Prierias, a Dominican writing late in the fifteenth century, following Antoninus, divides the various types of licit concealment into four distinct categories, the last, like Antoninus’s priest at the city gates, involving mental reservation. Imagine we are asked about something that we are not free to discuss. In such cases, we can respond that we do not know, while to ourselves adding the appropriate clause to render our statement true. Sylvester looks to the Gospels for support. When Mark asks Christ when the day of judgment will occur, the Lord responds that he doesn’t know, no doubt adding to himself, or so Sylvester believes, “such that I should reveal it to you.” Significantly, Sylvester begins this entire discussion with a crucial caveat. We are free to employ these techniques only in those cases in which we are not bound to respond according to our questioner’s intentions and, at the very end of his discussion, warns that we must avoid all these methods of concealment when they might give rise to scandal, when we are before a just judge, or when they concern something that we are bound to confess. Exceeding these limits, our words will become dishonest, and we will become liars.
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While everyone who had written on the subject agreed that context and intention shape the severity our lies, whether they are malicious or beneficial, whether they are mortal or venial, they also agreed that the difference between telling the truth and telling a lie was an entirely private and internal matter, depending solely
on the speaker’s intention to make a false assertion. While it might well have public consequences, the essence of the lie itself had nothing to do with the liar’s audience and everything to do with the liar’s decision to let his words misrepresent his thoughts. It doesn’t matter what Isaac understands when Jacob claims to be Esau, just as it doesn’t matter what the Egyptians understand when Abraham tells them that Sarah is his sister. It doesn’t matter if they are deceived (which they are—Alexander of Hales had already admitted as much, as if what is obvious requires admitting), all that matters is what the speaker says and what the speaker intends, and if the speaker intends a true statement, then he has not lied. Having over the centuries worked through what, in retrospect, can only seem like the necessary implications of Augustine’s interpretation of scripture, though certainly not his Christology, these fifteenth-century writers suddenly uncovered a nearly limitless range of seemingly licit, deceptive, yet nonmendacious, communication.

This entirely internal and self-referential conception of lying helps to explain why the various limits that Antoninus and Sylvester place on the use of mental reservation seem so ad hoc and irrelevant to the question of our honesty and dishonesty. Since the difference between thought and speech no longer determines whether we lie, Antoninus and Sylvester have little alternative but to look to context as a moral check on the words we use. In response to the exact same question, we can offer the exact same response, and yet, they contend, depending on the situation and the person with whom we are speaking, our words and intentions remaining entirely unchanged, we may be telling the truth or speaking a lie. The internal incoherence of this effort stems from the disconnect between intention and context in traditional conceptions of mendacity. Whether or not our words cause scandal or stave off evil, whether we are responding to a just or unjust judge, or are speaking with someone to whom we are or are not obligated to respond, are entirely different questions from whether our responses are true or false. The entire point of these techniques, or so claimed their supporters, is that they keep us from lying, and this means they do not depend on the speaker making a false assertion. If the
use of mental reservation, selective response, and equivocation in and of themselves do not entangle us in lies, then it should hardly matter why we use them so long as we don’t use them for sinful purposes, and even if we do use them for sinful purposes, they are still not lies. Our intentions might be evil and our sins many, but our words remain true.