The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (23 page)

It was Martin Azpilcueta, more famously known in his day as Dr. Navarrus, who resolved this incoherence. An Augustinian canon and professor of canon law at the university of Salamanca before moving to Rome, where he died in 1586, Navarrus argued that the very nature of language rendered silent qualifications to our spoken words perfectly truthful.
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Navarrus made this case most fully in his
Commentary on the Chapter “Human Ears,”
a philosophically tinged reflection on a famous passage from Gregory the Great’s
Moralia on Job
. “The ear’s of men judge our words as they sound outwardly,” Gregory writes, “but the Divine judge hears those things we profess within ourselves. Men know each other’s will and intention through various words; but we shouldn’t consider words, but the will and the intention, for the intention ought not depend upon the words, but the words on the intention.” To test the implications of the idea that God hears both our spoken and our silent words, Navarrus considers a case of decidedly devious behavior. Imagine that a man, with no intention of making good on his vow, privately tells a woman, “I take you for my wife.” Later, when a judge asks him, “Did you speak those words,” the man responds that he did not, adding silently to himself, “with any intention of actually doing so.” Navarrus then asks three questions: Did the man lie before God? Even if he didn’t lie before God, did he perjure himself before God? And, finally, even if he neither lied nor committed perjury, did he commit some other sin?
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While the idea that God hears, sees, and understands all our communicative acts is hardly a controversial idea, Navarrus draws a rather unexpected consequence from it. If it is true that God understands both our spoken and silent words, then he can understand sentences and ideas composed out of both as single statements. “Through which it is obvious,” Navarrus concludes, “that
the man did not lie before God because in his divine majesty he knows and sees the truly intended sense,” and this is case even though the judge or anyone else who heard what the man said would judge the statement to be false. Navarrus finds additional support for his theory of “mixed speech” or “amphibology” in the writings of the dialecticians who teach that there are many different kinds of language, “purely mental, purely vocal, purely written and a mixture of these.” When we judge the truth or falsity of our own or someone else’s statements, we need to take all these parts into account. Imagine the following mixed statement, Navarrus offers by way of example, “God is an angel,” of which the first two words are spoken aloud, the last two mentally. Although the spoken part is perfectly orthodox, the statement as a whole must be considered heretical. Navarrus, picking up on an argument from Prierias, even suggests that scripture and Church practice supports this conception of mixed language. “Our lord Jesus Christ, who was and is the way, the truth and the life,” Navarrus argues, employed amphibology when he claimed not to know the date of the final judgment. Considered as purely vocal speech, Christ’s claim is surely false because he knows all things most truly, but when taken in conjunction with its mental qualification, “such that I should reveal it to you,” the statement is true. The privacy of confession likewise demonstrates the reality of mixed speech. When asked if a confessant committed some sin, the Church considers it perfectly acceptable and honest for the confessor to respond, “No he did not,” even if he did, so long as the confessor has added the appropriate mental statement to render the completed statement true.
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Although Navarrus agrees that every lie is a sin, that the essence of the lie rests in false assertion, its perfection in the desire to deceive, the theory of mixed language is utterly foreign to the spirit of Augustine’s thought.
⁹⁴
Augustine had rooted his objection against lies in Christ’s incarnation as the Word made flesh and his willingness to witness Truth publicly and openly on the cross. It was the incarnation that demanded the identity between inner thought and spoken word, guaranteeing that false assertion was
necessarily sinful. By contrast, Navarrus’s theory of mixed statements creates the possibility that no matter what we say, we will never have to speak against our mind. Antoninus and Sylvester had attempted something similar but failed to offer an internally consistent account of why mental reservations were at times truthful, at other times mendacious. They were, therefore, compelled to look to external factors to discriminate honesty from dishonesty, even as their definition of what it meant to lie remained entirely internal to the liar. Navarrus sidesteps this entire problem, offering a theory of language that guarantees the honesty of mental reservations. Given the amphibological nature of language, properly conceived mixed statements are never lies. His test case makes this abundantly clear. The man who privately tells a woman “I take you for my wife” neither lies nor perjures himself when he tells the judge that he never vowed marriage to her, adding silently to himself “with the intent of actually marrying her.” If his statement is not a lie, then, considered on its own, neither is it a sin. It is, in a sense, morally neutral. With the question of dishonesty bracketed, context, circumstance, and intention will entirely determine whether the man’s actions are sinful or not. In fact, having undone the link between dishonesty and deception, Navarrus creates the possibility of honest deceptions, deceptions in no way tainted by sin. Our simulations are good, “useful” as Jerome put it, when we use them “prudently and ordinately with just cause, and without evil intent and foxlike craftiness [
astutia vulpinus
], and apart from any lying words or deeds.” By contrast, they are bad when we simulate “evilly and inordinately without just cause, or not caring whether or not they lie.”
⁹⁵
In this case, the man acted with evil deceit [
dolo malo
] if he deceived the woman in order to have sex with her outside wedlock. On the other hand, if he deceived her in order to keep himself unmarried and, therefore, able to enter holy orders, he acted with good deceit [
dolo bono
].
⁹⁶

The theory of mixed speech represents something like the culminating moment of an ethical trajectory begun some four hundred years earlier in Peter Lombard’s
Sentences
. If the entire tendency of Scholastic thinking about lies had been to frame their
moral status in terms of the world, in terms of good achieved or evil avoided, in terms of intention and circumstance, Navarrus completes this process. Language, now liberated from theology, becomes entirely part of the world and, as part of the world, becomes good or bad, rewarded or punished, depending on its relations to the world. Not only are we perfectly right to use mixed statements when unjust judges or evil questioners interrogate us, we can also employ them to avoid all sorts of “negligent” sins committed in the course of daily life. If a friend asks us for money or for a book, we are free to respond “I don’t have it” even if we do, so long as we silently add, “such that I would give it to you.” Mixed speech also has great political value, Navarrus adds, and even kings have been known to use it, telling pleasant falsehoods rendered true through silent adumbration to members of their court.
⁹⁷

There were dangers here, and Navarrus’s critics noted them. Theologians had long argued that the fabric of society would collapse if lies were sometimes thought to be acceptable, and that collapse seemed all the more imminent in a world of mixed speech. Citing Angelus of Clavasi and Prierias, along with Navarrus, as the main proponents of mixed speech, the sixteenth-century Jesuit theologian Juan Azor feared that if such subterfuge were freely allowed, “every sort of lie could be excused,” and “all human intercourse and charity destroyed.”
⁹⁸
By lumping Navarrus together with Angelus and Prierias, it is not at all clear if Azor appreciates the crucial differences between their theories. Certainly Navarrus would have denied that his theory sanctioned any type of lie. Subtleties aside, Azor admitted the licit use of mental reservations, while simultaneously placing the same sorts of limits on them as had Angelus and Prierias. Navarrus had done the same, arguing that mixed statements are licit when employed for just causes, when they do not offend against charity, when we are not bound to respond in the sense our interrogators or questioners understand. When we violate these limits, our words become sinful but not mendacious. By contrast, Azor and most of the other Jesuits who came after Navarrus, who would reject the theory of mixed
language while accepting more traditional versions of mental reservation, argued that when we exceed the limits of just cause our words become lies.
⁹⁹

These specific differences must not obscure how all these later writers had reversed the role of context in the discourse of lies. Scholastic theologians, interested in pushing the range of licit speech, looked to intention and circumstance to reduce the culpability of certain sorts of lies, to render them merely venial and almost negligible. With the theory of mixed statements and the practice of mental reservation, theologians looked to context and the notion of just cause to restrain a theory of language that threatened to make it impossible ever to know how to understand the meaning of a speaker’s words. Let loose into the world, it seemed as if only the world could help hold back our deceit.

F
ROM
P
ASCAL TO
A
UGUSTINE AND
B
EYOND

Like Juan Azor before him, Pascal most likely did not perceive the difference between Navarrus’s theory of mixed speech and the Jesuit doctrines of equivocation and mental reservation that he pilloried in his
Provincial Letters
. It wouldn’t have mattered if he had. Pascal’s disdain for such techniques was not rooted in the niceties of detail but in the rejection of an entire theological conception of ourselves and our place in the world that Henry Hammond would describe as the “mystery of Jesuitisme.” As it turned out, it was not exactly a Jesuit mystery, even if Jesuit theologians were the ones who had refined and promoted it, written about it, defended it and, in time, popularized it. Its immediate roots could be traced back to the writings of fifteenth-century theologians like the Dominican friar Antoninus of Florence and the Augustinian canon Martin Azpilcueta, and its conceptual possibility extended even further back, to the medieval university, to John Duns Scotus, Thomas Aquinas. and to Peter Lombard’s
Sentences
. Pascal’s critique begins at precisely that point where Scholastic writers first diverged from Augustine, when they took seriously the idea that they could evaluate the moral gravity of our lies, deploying ideas
about intention and context, the civil, the political, means and ends, to determine which are mortal and which are venial.
¹⁰⁰

Pascal makes this case most clearly in the seventh of his
Provincial Letters
when he accuses the Jesuits of being more concerned with policy than with religion. Learning Jesuit views concerning the right to kill another in defense of one’s honor or in retaliation for slander or “a saucy gesture,” Montalte (Pascal’s stand-in) reminds the Jesuit father with whom he is speaking that God prohibits killing. The Jesuits agree with God’s prohibition, the father responds, but they have their own reasons for accepting it. Quoting a fellow Jesuit, he clarifies: “Although the opinion that we may kill a man for calumny is not without its probability in theory, the contrary one ought to be followed in practice; for in our mode of defending ourselves, we should always avoid doing injury to the commonwealth.”
¹⁰¹
At the heart of this approach to morals, Pascal contends, is a turn from God to the world, a turn rooted in the sin of pride and a self-love capable of justifying any desire, forever transforming falsehoods into apparent truths, as we unknowingly drift further from any hope of salvation.
¹⁰²
And so it is, Pascal contends, that the Jesuits find it perfectly reasonable to modify any tenet of faith as they see fit. Even the most fundamental beliefs about Jesus Christ are ripe for reinterpretation. “Where the doctrine of a crucified God is accounted foolishness,” the Jesuit father blithely announces to a horrified Montalte, “they suppress the offense of the cross and preach only a glorious and not a suffering Jesus Christ.”
¹⁰³
What is left, Pascal argues, is nothing but a “criminal neutrality” in which the Jesuits remain utterly indifferent to what is true and what is false, to the Gospel and their own ideas, as they forge a horrible alliance between Jesus Christ and the Devil.
¹⁰⁴

Parody allows Pascal to make mental reservation and equivocation look like the shape-shifting practices of egotistical hotheads and avaricious cowards, but he roots his parody in Augustinian ideas of grace and original sin. Pascal is simply not interested in entering into Scholastic debates about the fine lines that separate licit from illicit speech, concealment from mendacity. Lying for him is less a linguistic or ethical problem than it is a profound
spiritual and ontological disorder whose source extends back to Adam and Eve and the Fall. “Man is, therefore, only disguise, falsehood and hypocrisy,” he writes in his
Pensées
, “both in himself and in regards to others. He does not want to be told the truth. He avoids telling it to others. And all these dispositions, so far removed from justice and reason, have a natural root in his heart.”
¹⁰⁵
Perhaps the world abounds in moral conundrums, but the real problem rests in our fallen faculties, our imperceptible desires and constant distractions, in a pride and self-love that blinds us to ourselves even as we set ourselves up as gods, judging good and evil. These are the sad consequences of original sin, a punishment we all suffer because of one man’s transgression, a punishment so contrary to human conceptions of justice that it appears irrational and, appearing irrational, remains forever inaccessible to human reason.
¹⁰⁶