The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (40 page)

I
NTRODUCTION:
I
S
I
T
E
VER
A
CCEPTABLE TO
L
IE?

1
.     Dante Alighieri,
Dante’s Inferno: The Indiana Critical Edition
, trans. Mark Musa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), canto 18, in order, ln. 114, 35, 133–36. Virgil’s more general description of Malebolge occurs earlier, canto 11, ln. 52–69: “Fraud, that gnaws the conscience of its servants, / can be used on one who puts his trust in you / or else on one who has no trust invested. // This latter sort seems only to destroy / the bond of love that Nature gives to man; / so in the second circle there are nests // of hypocrites, flatterers, dabblers in sorcery, / falsifiers, thieves and simonists, / panders, seducers, grafters and like filth. // The former kind of fraud both disregards / the love Nature enjoys and that extra bond / between men which creates a special trust; // thus, it is in the smallest of the circles, / at the earth’s center, around the throne of Dis, / that traitors suffer their eternal pain.”

2
.     
Dante’s Inferno
, canto 32, ln. 36.

3
.     
Dante’s Inferno
, canto 11, ln. 25–27.

4
.     Matthew 26:25. Unless otherwise noted, all biblical passages come from the
New Standard Revised Version, with Apocrypha
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). On sin and placement in the
Inferno
, see Marc Cogan,
The Design in the Wax: The Structure of the
Divine Comedy
and Its Meaning
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 36–75.

5
.     
Dante’s Inferno
, canto 23, ln. 142–45.

6
.     
Dante’s Inferno
, canto 33, ln. 91–150.

7
.     On plants, insects, and spiders, see Natalie Angier, “The Art of Deception: Sometimes Survival Means Lying, Stealing or Vanishing in Place,”
National Geographic
, August 2009, 70–87. On primate deception, Euclid O. Smith, “Deception and Evolutionary Biology,”
Cultural Anthropology
2 (1987): 50–64.

8
.     Robert Feldman,
The Liar in Your Life: The Way to a Truthful Relationship
(New York: Twelve, 2009), 14–15. On evolutionary aspects of human deception, David Livingstone Smith,
Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004), 11–12, writes, “Nature selected those mental capacities that helped spread our genes, and those that proved unhelpful were ineluctably snuffed out. As any seducer knows, honesty and reproductive success are not necessarily
good bedfellows. Because deception and self-deception helped our species to succeed in the never-ending struggle for survival, natural selection made them part of our nature.”

9
.     The contemporary literature on lying is immense. An accepted and accessible starting point for most philosophical discussions is Sissela Bok,
Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life
(New York: Vintage Books, 1999, 2nd ed.), also, David Nyberg,
The Varnished Truth: Truth Telling and Deceiving in Ordinary Life
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). For lying in politics, see Martin Jay,
The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), and for a sociological perspective, J. A. Barnes,
A Pack of Lies: Towards a Sociology of Lying
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

10
.   Bernard of Clairvaux,
On Humility and Pride
, trans. G. R. Evans, in
Bernard of Clairvaux: Selected Works
(New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 114. The scriptural passages come from Psalms 118:75 and 115:11 respectively.

11
.   Perez Zagorin,
Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 330. Also, Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin,
The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), which organizes itself around the era of “high casuistry,” roughly the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There are, of course, histories of medieval attitudes about lying, including a series of essays by Arthur Landgraf, beginning with “Definition und Sündhaftigkeit der Lüge nach der Lehre der Frühscholastik,”
Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie
63 (1939): 50–85, as well as innumerable essays and books focusing on specific medieval writers.

12
.   Zagorin,
Ways of Lying
, is the authoritative work on this topic. Also, John Sommerville, “The New Art of Lying: Equivocation, Mental Reservation, and Casuistry,” in
Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe
, ed. Edmund Leites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 159–84.

13
.   Niccolò Machiavelli, “Letter #179, To Franceso Guicciardini, 17 May 1521,” in
The Letters of Machiavelli: A Selection of His Letters
, trans. and ed. Allan Gilbert (New York: Capricorn Books, 1961), 200. Recent valuable monographs on deception and the Renaissance court include Jean-Pierre Cavaillé,
Dis/simulations. Jules-César Vanini, François La Mothe Le Vayer, Gabriel Naudé, Louis Machon et Torquato Accetto. Religion, morale et politique au XVIIe siècle
(Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002), and Jon Snyder,
Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

14
.   Snyder,
Dissimulation
, 184, ft. 23, discusses some of the background to this maxim.

15
.   Sylvester Prierias,
Sylvestrinae Summae
, pars secunda, “De Mendacio & Mendace” (Lyon: Mauricius Roy & Ludovicus Pesnot, 1555), 225.

16
.   Dante,
Inferno
, canto 27. Fittingly, Guido fell victim to false counsel himself, believing he could commit and repent of a sin at the same time, ln. 98–102: “He asked me to advise him. I was silent, / for his words were drunken. Then
he spoke again: / ‘Fear not, I tell you: the sin you will commit, / it is forgiven. Now you will teach me how / I can level Palestrina to the ground.”

17
.   Niccolò Machiavelli,
The Prince
, trans. Peter Bonadanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), ch. 18, 58–59. Lionel Trilling,
Sincerity and Authenticity
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 13–14, takes this contrast between Dante and Machiavelli as definitive of the differences between medieval and early modern attitudes about truth-telling.

18
.   Medievalists themselves may have inadvertently abetted this process. Most work on lying in the Middle Ages focuses exclusively on the Augustinian-inflected theological and pastoral traditions, and on what were known as the “sins of the tongue.” See, for example, two very good books, Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio,
Les péchés de la langue: Discipline et éthique de la parole dans la culture médiévale
, trans. Philippe Baillet (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1991), and Edwin D. Craun,
Lies, Slander, and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

19
.   The best recent book to make these sorts of claims is John Jeffries Martin’s otherwise excellent
Myths of Renaissance Individualism
(New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 7, which attempts “to approach the history of the Renaissance self from a new angle, neither Burckhardt’s nor Greenblatt’s,” arguing instead that “there were multiple models of identity in the Renaissance,” almost always concerned “with what we might call, provisionally at least, the relation of the internal to the external self.” The great virtue of Martin’s methodology, one I have used in this book, is his refusal to reify a Renaissance conception of self, offering instead case studies of different ways different sorts of people adapted to the world. Still, when it comes time to define what is novel about these Renaissance developments, Martin invokes contrasts between medieval theologians and monks and all variety of Renaissance people. See, for example, his discussion of prudence, 48–53, and
concordia
and sincerity, 109–17.

20
.   While theologians agreed that any lie was always sinful, there was debate about whether the lies of holy men were worse than the lies of the ordinary religious. See, for example, Bonaventure,
Sententiarum
, III, in
Opera Omnia
, 4 vols. (Quaracchi: Collegii S. Bonaventura, 1882–89), dist. XXXVIII, quaest. 847–49, where he asks, “Utrum omne mendacium sit mortale viris perfectis?”

21
.   For two rather different defenses of the use of “perennial questions” as a mode of historical inquiry, see Mark Bevir, “Are There Perennial Problems in Political Theory?”
Political Studies
42 (1994): 662–75, and John Patrick Diggins, “The Oyster and the Pearl: The Problem of Contextualism in Intellectual History,”
History and Theory
23:2 (May 1984): 151–69.

22
.   I use the term “tradition” here in somewhat the same sense as Mark Bevir,
The Logic of the History of Ideas
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 200–220, uses it in his defense of the history of ideas against its contextualist critics. At 203, for example, he writes, “Because traditions persist only through teachers initiating pupils into shared understandings, we must avoid hypostatising them. We must not ascribe traditions an occult or Platonic
existence independent of the beliefs of specific individuals. Traditions are not fixed entities people produce by their own activities. The exponents of a tradition bring it into being and determine its progress by developing webs of belief in the ways they do.”

23
.   Augustine,
Against Lying
, trans. Harold B. Jaffee, in Augustine,
Treatises on Various Subjects
, ed. Roy J. Deferrari (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1952), ch. 10 (23), 152.

C
HAPTER
O
NE
. T
HE
D
EVIL

1
.     Which is not to say later Jewish interpreters were uninterested in the first couple. See James L. Kugel,
The Bible as It Was
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 67–82.

2
.     Luke 3:23–38.

3
.     Romans 5:14.

4
.     Romans 5:12–14.

5
.     Romans 5:19. Jaroslav Pelikan,
The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600)
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 141–55, notes that it was not until the second century that Irenaeus, developing ideas already present in liturgical practice, provided a theological underpinning for the correspondence between Adam and Christ. For the deeper background, Henry Angsar Kelly,
Satan: A Biography
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 175–82.

6
.     The best overall review of the history of interpretations of the early chapters of Genesis remains J. M. Evans,
‘Paradise Lost’ and the Genesis Tradition
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). On developing conceptions of Satan, see Neil Forsyth,
The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). For studies of medieval interpretations, see Eric Jager,
The Tempter’s Voice: Language and the Fall in Medieval Literature
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Useful works on Renaissance and Reformation interpretations include Arnold Williams,
The Common Expositor: An Account of the Commentaries on Genesis, 1527–1633
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948), Lise Wajeman,
La parole d’Adam, le corps d’Eve: le péché originel au XVI siècle
(Geneva: Droz, 2007), and Kathleen M. Crowther,
Adam and Eve in the Protestant Reformation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). On the seventeenth century, see Philip C. Almond,
Adam & Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

7
.     Augustine,
The City of God
, trans. and ed. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), bk. 14, ch. 12, 607.

8
.     Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus,
The Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus
, trans. George W. Shea (Tempe: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997), 72.

9
.     Martin Luther,
Lectures on Genesis, Chapters 1–5
, in
Luther’s Works
, vol. 1, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and trans. George V. Schick (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1958), 141.

10
.   Augustine,
The Literal Meaning of Genesis
, trans. John Hammond Taylor (New York: Newman Press, 1982), bk. 11, ch. 6, 139.

11
.   Jacobus Acontius,
Satans Strategems or the Devils Cabinet-Council Discovered
(London: John Macock, 1648).

12
.   2 Corinthians 1:3.

13
.   John 8:20–44.

14
.   Luther,
Lectures
, ch. 3, 146.

15
.   Bonaventure,
Commentarius in Evangelium S. Ioannis
, in
Opera Omnia
, vol. 6 (Quaracchi: Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1893), 366.

16
.   John Chrysostom,
Homilies on Genesis: 1–17
, trans. Robert C. Hill (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1985), 209.

17
.   Nicholas of Lyra,
Postilla
, in
Bibliorum Sacrorum cum Glossa Ordinaria … et Postilla Nicolai Lyrani
(Venice, 1603), col. 1167. The twelfth-century Benedictine abbot and theologian Rupert of Deutz,
In Genesim
, lib. III, cap. IV, in
Opera
(Paris: Caroli Chastellain, 1638), 38–39, recognizing that questions are not commonly thought to be true or false, argues that the serpent’s question is a lie because he uses it to conceal his knowledge of God’s prohibition and to lead the woman into disobedience.

18
.   John Calvin,
Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis
, vol. 1, trans. John King (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1847), 146.