The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (3 page)

More often than not, when historians tell the history of lying and deception, it is a history of early modern Europe, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, “the Age of Dissimulation.”
¹¹
Both religious controversies and the centralization of power in the various European states during this period leant particular urgency to questions about the morality of lying and deception. Protestants in Catholic lands and Catholics in Protestant lands had to ask themselves if it was acceptable to lie, conceal, or dissimulate their true beliefs in order to avoid jail, torture, and death at the hands of their persecutors, whether they could lie to protect friends and family from similar fates.
¹²
Members of the aristocracy felt similar pressures as they vied with one another to secure positions in the increasingly centralized and politically absolutist European states. Whether engaged in diplomatic missions or managing life in the competitive, often capricious and conspiratorial world of the court, the courtier needed to manage his self-presentation with utmost care, knowing what to say and what not to say, when to mislead and when to lie. Machiavelli, who not only wrote the most infamous book of political advice of the Renaissance but also served as a diplomat for the Republic of Florence, described the
personal consequences of this predicament in a famous letter he wrote to Francesco Guicciardini: “For a long time I have not said what I believed, nor do I even believe what I say, and if indeed I do happen to tell the truth, I hide it among so many lies that it is hard to find.”
¹³
A tad hyperbolic perhaps, but certainly fitting for an era whose most oft-repeated maxim may well have been “A man does not know how to live, who does not know how to dissimulate.”
¹⁴

The question of deception was seemingly everywhere during these centuries, in conduct manuals and ethical treatises, in plays and novels, touched on directly or implicitly, at length or in passing. Baldassare Castiglione’s
Book of the Courtier
, first published in 1528, was reprinted 108 times by 1616 and translated into most every European language. After Castiglione, Giovanni della Casa’s
Galateo: Or, the Rules of Polite Behavior
appeared in 1558, Torquato Tasso’s dialogue
Malpiglio, or the Court
in 1587. The Spanish Jesuit Baltesar Gracián’s
Art of Worldly Prudence
proved an overnight sensation on publication in 1647. In France, both Pierre Charon’s early seventeenth-century treatise
On Wisdom
and Madeleine de Scudéry’s
On Lying
(part of her popular late-century work
Conversations on Diverse Subjects
) achieved wide readership, while, a century earlier, Philbert de Vienne’s satirical
Philosopher of the Court
hit close enough to home that more than a few readers took it for the real thing. No one missed the point when the renowned playwright Molière parodied both the self-interested religious hypocrite and the insufferably vain truth-teller in two of his greatest comedies,
Tartuffe
and
The Misanthrope
. Meanwhile, in England, Nathaniel Walker translated della Casa’s treatise as
The Refin’d Courtier
, while John Taylor would strike a blow for truth-telling in
A Satyre against, Equivocation, Mentall Reservation and Detestable Simulation
.

All this early modern interest in deception must mean something, and historians have often argued that its significance becomes clear only when contrasted with medieval attitudes about lying, and especially those of the early fifth-century North African bishop Augustine of Hippo, who famously and categorically prohibited all lies. Every lie is a sin, Augustine would argue, and we
must never choose to sin, never mind our reasons, never mind the consequences. Augustine’s opinion soon became every theologian’s opinion, repeated over the centuries, throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and long after as a truism never to be doubted. “Is every lie a sin?” the Dominican Sylvester Prierias would ask late in the fifteenth century. “I answer that it is not even licit to lie for the sake of saving someone’s life, as Augustine, St. Thomas and all the theologians and canon lawyers teach.”
¹⁵
A difficult standard to live up to and one that almost every subsequent theologian would try to work around, but certainly one that contrasts profoundly with what would soon be common, if never uncontroversial, advice in the sixteenth century. In Dante’s
Inferno
, for example, Guido de Montefeltro suffers eternally among the false counselors for having so often played the part “not of a lion, but of a fox,” advising acts of cunning and fraud, telling lies and making false promises.
¹⁶
When Machiavelli takes up the metaphor in
The Prince
several centuries later, he famously advises his readers that “it is necessary to be a fox in order to recognize the traps and a lion in order to frighten the wolves. Those who play only the part of the lion do not understand matters. A wise ruler, therefore, cannot and should not keep his word when such an observance of faith would be to his disadvantage and when the reasons which made him promise are removed.”
¹⁷
His stratagems may have been successful, but Guido languishes in hell all the same, while Machiavelli, in
The Prince
at least, seems simply not to care at all about the spiritual consequences of his advice.

While these contrasts are stark, they are a bit misleading. Too often, historians imagine that the difference between medieval and early modern Europe can be captured in the differences between medieval monks, priests, and theologians, on the one hand, and Renaissance humanists and courtiers, on the other. Through a sleight of hand, even if unintentional, “Scholastic” comes to stand in for “medieval,” as if the writings of university-trained theologians speak transparently for all medieval men and women.
¹⁸
Compared with medieval religious writings, the early modern emphasis on deception looks new indeed, as if people had suddenly
become less concerned about faith and more concerned about the world. Hand in hand with this new worldliness, people similarly seem to turn inward. As any number of historians have argued, the promotion of techniques of concealment and dishonesty among early modern writers allegedly provides evidence for new conceptions of the individual, rooted in clearer (or more complicated or more ambiguous) divisions between the exterior and interior self. While there might be something to these claims, there is not as much as historians think. Is it really all that surprising that Scholastic theologians and theologically inspired poets had different views about lying, about how to live in the world, than did Renaissance humanists and courtiers? Even the attitudes of medieval humanists and courtiers differed from those of their Scholastic peers.
¹⁹

This is not another example of the historian’s trick of arguing that everything new is old again, of the medievalist’s cry that “socalled” Renaissance discoveries are little more than thefts from the closet of the past. Rather, it is to suggest that if we hope to understand what changed as Europe moved from a premodern to an early modern society, we need to be careful about how we put that story together. We must not unduly smooth it over, nor mismatch its narrative parts to create startling, though not entirely accurate, contrasts. There was not one medieval response to the question
Is it ever acceptable to lie?
—there were many. If theologians achieved a fair degree of consensus when specifically addressing the question, they disagreed, often significantly, in the fine points of their analyses. When questions about lying came up in other theological contexts, in biblical passages in which the patriarchs or demons or even God seem to lie, or when mulling the many mysteries of the Eucharist or Christ’s incarnation, theological analyses of lying were often stretched near to the breaking point. Outside the rooms and walls of the medieval university, there were entirely different attitudes about lying. In both medieval court manuals and vernacular romances, those ever-popular stories of knightly chivalry and clandestine love, writers understood lying to be an unfortunate, but completely legitimate, response to a fallen and confusing
world. Even Dante’s pilgrim in the ninth circle of hell is not above misleading and deceiving, making promises that he knows his interlocutor cannot possibly understand and then confidently justifying his deceptions by claiming his ice-blinded victim deserves whatever mistreatment he receives.

To attempt to do justice to these many historical strands, this book does not offer a single monolithic and chronological account of the history of lying. Rather, it presents the history of lying through five separate narratives, each one beginning in the early days of the Catholic Church or the Middle Ages and ending sometime late in the seventeenth or early in the eighteenth century. The book’s organizing question,
Is it ever acceptable to lie?
is well suited to this project of multiple retellings because it begs us to ask an additional question, a question about who it is that can or cannot sometimes justifiably lie. While theologians, at least when specifically addressing the question of lying in their commentaries on Peter Lombard’s
Sentences
, did not believe specifying the speaker mattered (that is, they believed that the same response applied identically to one and all alike), this was not the case when the question slipped into other sorts of theological discussions or when nontheologians asked the question.
²⁰
Is it ever okay
for whom
to lie? makes it possible to explore the different facets of this history.

This is at least one reason why it can be useful to do history, at least this history, in terms of an enduring and perennial question whose answer will differ depending on who does the asking and when. It allows us to perceive the fragmentations, the differences and debates, that exist in any culture at any one time, while simultaneously allowing us to trace how similarly situated people responded to the same question over time.
²¹
And people were similarly situated when they pondered this question from the early days of the Christian church until the eighteenth century, not least because they agreed about the origin of human mendacity and its consequences. The narrative of the Fall—of the serpent’s lying deception of Eve, Adam’s decision to disobey God, and the first couple’s exile from Eden—provided something like the bare bones of a tradition within which Christians would ask and answer this
question until well into the eighteenth century. Seventeenth-century natural scientists may have understood parts of that narrative differently than sixteenth-century reformers, and medieval theologians would understand it in yet other ways, but that tradition, transmitted from one generation to the next—some elements remaining unchanged, others evolving, disappearing, then reappearing, or taking on changed significance—set the stage within which Christians formed their beliefs about lies and lying.
²²

If the narrative of the Fall set the stage for over a millennium of reflection on lies, it was a stage whose borders were porous and shifting, first decorated one way, then another. Simply put, even while accepting much the same narrative, different people brought different sets of concerns to it, interpreted it differently, drew varied conclusions from it. This has at least two consequences for how the history of lying will be presented in this book. First, there are elements of this narrative that writers will assert again and again over the centuries, beliefs that fifth-century bishops hold in common with sixteenth-century reformers. To stress these continuities and to elaborate on them more fully, there will be moments when it will be useful, for example, to bring Augustine into dialogue with Martin Luther, to use Luther’s writings to make sense of and give added nuance to Augustine’s writings, to look to the Franciscan Nicholas of Lyra’s monumental fourteenth-century biblical commentaries as a way into the challenges that the seventeenth-century scientist and philosopher René Descartes faced as he worried about the problem of divine deception. Second, precisely because different writers told the story of the Fall differently, stressing different elements, integrating them with other sets of traditions, concerns, and ideas, it will be necessary to return to that story more than once in order to clarify how various writers drew on it, even as they used it to differentiate themselves from their peers and predecessors as they repeatedly asked the question
Is it ever acceptable to lie?

In order to accomplish these various tasks, the following chapters, divided into two parts, tell the history of lying as a response to this question when posed to five different types of speakers in
the medieval and early modern world. The first part considers how theologians addressed the problem of lying, the second how non-theologians addressed the problem. Since one of the claims this book makes is that theological attitudes about lying were much more varied than often realized, the first half of the book examines how theologians analyzed lying in three different contexts: in their attempts to understand the nature of the Devil’s deceitful words in the Garden of Eden, when they asked whether God could lie, and, finally, when they asked if it was ever licit for human beings to lie. Since another claim this book makes is that the opinion of professional theologians did not entirely define medieval attitudes about lying, the second half of the book shifts from the opinions of theologians to the opinions of two very different types of speakers: courtiers, on the one hand, and women, on the other.