The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (4 page)

The first chapters frame the ontological and metaphysical issues that will shape the rest of the book, but also seek to reveal how diverse the theological discussion of deception really was. To discuss lying and the Devil is to ask what precisely he did in the Garden of Eden, how did his words so quickly convince the Woman and, after her, Adam to sin against God’s commandment not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. From very early on, the Church fathers asserted that the serpent’s words were lies precisely because they altered and misinterpreted God’s sacred Word. Genesis made the danger of misinterpretation obvious, as it spread contagion-like to the Woman, who, responding to the serpent’s lying question, proceeded to alter God’s command yet again. As a result, the Devil came to stand for the prototypical sophist swaying his audience with self-serving lies, the heretical teacher leading his flock away from the clear and inspired holy words of scripture. To misinterpret scripture was, in a very real sense, to lie about God, and we lie about God whenever we deviate from the truth of his Word. But as fallen creatures, our intellects dimmed, no longer able to see God face to face and easily confused, how do we know if we have deviated? This question took on renewed significance in the aftermath of Martin Luther’s break with the Catholic Church as reformed theologians and believers
endlessly divided and subdivided into exegetically cantankerous sects, each claiming to be the sole keepers of God’s literal word while accusing everyone else of colluding with the Devil. An impossible situation, and one that could be surmounted, according to the sixteenth-century Italian Protestant convert Jacobus Acontius, only if we turned our attention from the Devil, as the source of lies, to our diminished faculties, as the continuing cause of our inability to reach complete interpretive clarity and agreement. In his treatise
Satans Strategems
Acontius would urge his fellow reformers to treat interpretive disagreement not as a sign of demonic possession but rather as the consequence of our fallen and finite state. Misinterpretation, the cause of our exile from Eden, becomes the possible precondition for our peaceful coexistence with others.

The second chapter turns from the Devil’s lie to ask the troubling question
Can God lie?
Considered in his essence, most theologians had no doubt that not only could God not lie, he could not even deceive. Beginning with Augustine (who, in part at least, drew on Platonic and Neoplatonic ideas concerning divinity), theologians understood God to be eternal and unchanging, immutable, just, and wise. It was inconceivable for such a being, incompatible with its very essence, to act so imperfectly as to deceive. Unfortunately, theologians had a rather difficult time squaring this philosophically inspired conception of God with the God described in scripture, a God who speaks, punishes, deceives, lies, and orders others to lie for him. How, for example, were they to explain away the fact that the entire possibility of human salvation depended on an apparent act of deception? A long line of theologians, poets, and artists, from Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century to Martin Luther in the sixteenth, believed that Christ had intentionally concealed his divinity from the Devil, hiding it within human flesh so the Devil would not know the true identity of the man he sought to crucify. The ritual consecration of the Eucharist posed a related problem. After the consecration of the host, the Church taught that the body of Christ was really and truly present, hidden within or behind the appearance of a simple piece of bread. Theologians attempted to justify these apparent deceptions through the
language and tools of rhetoric. Just as the Devil was the corrupt rhetorician, the evil sophist, God was the morally upright orator, perfectly fitting his words and deeds to the moment, countering evil with goodness, cunning with prudence. Whether this tactic successfully rescued God from charges of lying and deception is not entirely clear, but it highlights just how at odds the biblical and narrative conceptions of God as involved and interacting with the world were with philosophical conceptions of God as omnipotent, unchanging, and transcendent. Throughout the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, the tension between these two conceptions would prove completely incompatible, compelling the French philosopher René Descartes to argue that we can learn next to nothing about God from the Bible. God would be forever freed from charges of lying, but at the cost of no longer playing any active part in the world.

Taken together, the first two chapters describe the changing relations between the supernatural and the natural, between the Devil, God, and the world. In both cases, the history of lying reveals a gradual process of clarification and separation as the lines between the natural and supernatural become more distinct, more difficult to cross, as what once were divinely inspired features of the world become mere features of the world, ever more loosely tied to divine origins. The third chapter concludes the discussion of theological opinions about lying. Writing early in the fifth century, Augustine rooted his prohibition against lies in the nature of the Trinity and in the incarnation of Christ as the Word made flesh. When we lie, we undo our image and likeness to God. Every lie is a sin because with every lie we turn away from God. Scholastic theologians accepted Augustine’s prohibition as authoritative but grounded it, not in God, but in conceptions of justice, that is, in terms of our obligations to ourselves and others. A crucial reorientation, this move offered a basis for considering the possible benefits of our lies while simultaneously asserting that no lie can ever be justified in terms of its outcomes. From this point forward, the history of theological debate about the legitimacy of lying becomes the history of unending efforts to expand the range of misleading,
but nonmendacious, speech, an effort culminating in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings of Dominican and Jesuit casuists with their advocacy of such practices as equivocation and mental reservation. Blaise Pascal would lampoon these practices in his
Provincial Letters
, accusing the casuists of the most base and despicable sort of accommodation to the world. In response, he called for the good Christian to stand apart from worldly values, but even his writings evince some of the very adaptation he condemns.

The fourth and fifth chapters take up the problem of lying as it appeared to people whose relationship to the world made the problem of lying appear distinctly different than it did to theologians. The fourth chapter considers attitudes about lying among the members of Europe’s ecclesiastical and secular courts. A long tradition, dating back to Rome, consistently depicted the court as a place of deception and mendacity gone wild as status-seeking courtiers did everything in their power to win the notice of their superiors, mislead their equals, and quash their inferiors. In the Middle Ages, especially in the writings of John of Salisbury, the court came to represent most clearly the conditions of life in a fallen world. The response of courtiers to this situation, in the Middle Ages and throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, remained much the same: we must be skeptical, we must employ the tools of rhetoric and the faculty of prudence to determine how we should act and what we should say and, when necessary, when we must lie. We have no choice but to adapt to the ways of a fallen and deceitful world, to lie to the liars. Medieval, no less than early modern, works stress the difference between our inner thoughts and our outward appearance, and the need to regulate our self-presentation to fool and please and deceive those around us. Simply put, the alleged differences between medieval and early modern conceptions of the self are overstated and, when it comes to the history of lying, a distraction from a much more significant development. John of Salisbury in the twelfth century, Christine de Pizan at the beginning of the fifteenth, and Castiglione in the sixteenth century all stress that we must lie to counteract the lies of
others. Lies are the regrettable tools we must employ in our own self-defense and for the good of the community. Over the course of the sixteenth century, but especially in the seventeenth, writers such as Giovanni della Casa, François La Rochefoucauld, and Pierre Nicole will contend that lies are not simply weapons deployed in our self-defense. Rather, lies constitute the very foundation of society itself. Without all forms of deception and flattery, society would rend itself irrevocably as our most base and inescapable passions would be revealed for one and all to see. Early in the eighteenth century, Bernard Mandeville would push this line of thought one step further, arguing that lies do more than help us endure one another’s narcissistic pride: they are necessary if society is to progress and flourish.

The problem and fact of lying affected women differently than men. While we all might be liars, only women were thought to be inveterate liars. Greek medical ideas propounding the inferiority of women merged easily with a tradition of biblically based misogyny rooted in the story of the Fall, together forming the notion that all women were feebleminded and inconstant, lacking in both prudence and judgment, and always under the sway of their desires with no qualms about lying to satisfy them. Women were to men, so the analogy went, as the body was to the soul. In other words, women were associated with deceptive coverings, false surfaces, and seductive adornment. Endlessly repeated, these ideas passed down from the third-century writings of Tertullian and other Church fathers to the Middle Ages, and from there to succeeding generations. The challenge women faced was not simply whether or not it was licit to lie, but how to respond to a situation in which they were thought to be—indeed, taught that they were—the very embodiment of dishonesty. Confronted with this oppressive and institutionalized ideology, women writers responded with a two-pronged critique. On the one hand, they revealed the misogynist tradition for the fabric of lies it was. On the other, they rehabilitated the function of adornment, decoration, and deception. Christine de Pizan, writing at the beginning of the fifteenth century, took up the first task, correcting slanderous accounts of famous women
and pointing out the implausibility of biologically based misogyny. Some two centuries later, two Venetian women, Lucrezia Marinella and Moderata Fonte, would argue that men, no less than women, depend on style and adornment to make themselves known, while contending that the lies of men are infinitely more harmful than any lie a woman could tell. Madeleine de Scudéry, the most popular author of the seventeenth century, would bring this line of thought to its conclusion. For Scudéry, style and adornment become the very mark and basis of the ideal society. If our self-interested passions and desires pose the greatest threat to social harmony, then we must conceal, even repress, them behind false and insincere adornments of speech, little lies and social niceties. Societal relations may well become utterly superficial, with people more interested in amicability than truth, but at least in such a society women, finally, can coexist in peace with men.

Decomposing the history of lying into five separate narratives raises questions, not only about the interrelations between and among those narratives, but also about the movement from medieval to early modern conceptions of lying. While each chapter can be read on its own, independently of the others, taken together they do tell a larger story about the domestication and naturalization of mendacity as it moves from being a devastating demonic disruption of the orderly world of paradise to being the source of worldly order itself. These movements seem gradual rather than sudden, beginning sometime in the High Middle Ages and generally reaching their conclusion sometime in the mid-seventeenth or even eighteenth century. At least when it comes to the history of lying, sharp divisions between the medieval and the early modern seem to be more hindrance than aid to understanding these developments, rendering differences sharper and more radical than they really are. If there is a moment that seems to divide the past from the present, these narrative histories suggest it can be found sometime in the eighteenth century, when it became possible to ask the question
Is it ever acceptable to lie?
outside the tradition of the Fall.

No doubt some readers will be surprised that certain topics or writers are barely discussed or not discussed at all. There is
nothing on politics and lying, on Renaissance debates about “the reason of state,” nor anything about the truth status of fiction and history. In response, I can only point out that the history of lying is immense, and no book could provide anything approaching a comprehensive account of it. Hopefully the book itself, its aims and logic, will justify what is included and what has been quietly passed over. This is a book about the problem of lying as it appeared to people from the fourth until the eighteenth century, that is, as a problem deeply connected to the tragic events in the Garden of Eden and how, finally, it became possible to imagine it as a problem having nothing to do with those events. In other words, it is a book about how the problem of lying became our problem, the problem as we know it today. At the same time, it is a book that hopes to upset a popular narrative that contrasts the medieval and the early modern in terms of diametrically opposed attitudes about lying and the easy contrasts that flow from that opposition. In order to accomplish these joint goals, this book examines the historical response to one question from a variety of perspectives, the theological and the secular, the uncreated and the created, the masculine and the feminine, revealing, if not the total diversity of opinions, a much greater diversity than historians have previously recognized. No doubt other perspectives could have been included, but it is difficult to imagine this history without these five perspectives, and certainly these five seem adequate to fulfill this book’s goals. Augustine may have had some sympathy for the predicament of having more to say than one should or has the time to say. “Hence it is not a lie when truth is passed over in silence,” he writes in his early fifth-century treatise
Against Lying
, “but when falsehood is brought forth in speech.”
²³
And hopefully, if it is not a lie to pass over the truth in silence, neither will it be misleading, at least in what follows.