The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (44 page)

106
. Gerald L. Bruns,
Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in Literary History
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 94: “[I]n Descartes’ construction God, in creating the world, is not obliged to speak, He does not say, ‘Let there be light.’ Even if he did say it, no light would therefore shine. Systems are alogorithmic rather than logocentric, as Leibniz knew, which is a way of explaining the Cartesian or rationalist thesis that God does not create the world, he introduces procedures, in whose actual operation and results he need not maintain any loving or mythological interest—or, as John Stuart Mill thought, could not maintain an interest even if he wanted to. Hence the old schoolroom joke that Descartes proved the existence of God only to show how little God matters in the scheme of things.”

107
. Descartes,
Principles
, 2.36, 240.

108
. Cited and translated in Robert C. Bartlett, “On the Politics of Faith and Reason: The Project of Enlightenment in Pierre Bayle and Montesquieu,”
Journal of Politics
63:1 (February 2001): 1–28, here p. 12, ft. 13, and, generally, 9–12. The line in its original context can be found in Pierre Bayle,
Ce que c’est
que la France toute Catholique sous le règne de Louis le Grand
, ed. Elisabeth Labrousse (Paris: J. Vrin, 1973), 46.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE
. H
UMAN
B
EINGS

1
.     Blaise Pascal,
Les Provinciales, or, The Mystery of Jesuitisme
, 2nd ed., trans. Henry Hammond (London: Richard Royston, 1658), (mostly) unpaginated prefatory material written by Hammond.

2
.     Augustine,
Against Lying
, ch. 1 (1), 126.

3
.     Augustine,
Against Lying
, ch. 6 (11), 137. Viriginia Burrus,
The Making of a Heretic: Gender, Authority and the Priscillianist Controversy
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 115–22, surveys Consentius’s efforts.

4
.     Augustine,
Against Lying
, ch. 18 (36), 171–72.

5
.     1 Corinthians 9:20.

6
.     Augustine, letters 28 and 40, in
Saint Augustine: Letters
, vol. 1 (1–82), trans. Wilifrid Parsons (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1951), 93–98 and 172–179. For an outline of this debate, see Boniface Ramsey, “Two Traditions on Lying and Deception in the Ancient Church,”
Thomist
49 (1985): 504–33.

7
.     Lombard,
The Sentences
, bk. III, dist. 38, chs. 1–5, 157–61.

8
.     John Downame,
A Treatise Against Lying
(London, 1636), 15, sets the tone for the rest of the work when he begins his second chapter, “Wherein it is shewed what a Lye is,” with one of Augustine’s definitions of a lie: “Saint
Augustine
briefely defineth it thus; A Lye is a false signification with a will to deceive.”

9
.     Pascal,
The Mystery of Jesuitisme
, unpaginated prefatory material by Henry Hammond. Random capitalizations found in the original.

10
.   Blaise Pascal,
The Provincial Letters
, trans. Thomas M’Crie (Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1880), “Letter IX,” 270.

11
.   Pascal,
Provincial Letters
, “Letter IX,” 277–78. I have slightly altered the translation. For the original see
Les Provinciales
, in
Pascal: Edition definitive des Oeuvres Complètes
, vol. II, ed. Fortunat Strowski (Paris: Libraire Ollendorff, 1926), 94.

12
.   Pascal,
Les Provinciales
, “Letter IX,” 278.

13
.   Augustine,
Against Lying
, ch. 3 (4)–(6), 129–33.

14
.   For Augustine’s philosophical influences, see Gerard Watson, “St. Augustine and the Inner Word: The Philosophical Background,”
Irish Theological Quarterly
54 (1988): 81–92, and Marcia Colish, “The Stoic Theory of Verbal Signification,” in
Archéologie de signe
, ed. Lucie Brind’Amour and Eugene Vance (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies Press, 1982), 17–43.

15
.   Augustine,
On the Trinity
, bk. 15, chs. 10 and 11 (18–20), 185–88. Christopher Kirwan, “Augustine’s Philosophy of Language,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Augustine
, 195–201. See also Paul Vincent Spade, “The Semantics of Terms,” in
The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy
, ed. Norman Kretzman et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),
186–204, here, 188–90. Margaret Miles, “Vision: The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mind in Saint Augustine’s
De trinitate
,”
Journal of Religion
63:2 (April 1983): 125–42, discusses the function of vision and visual metaphors in Augustine’s theology.

16
.   Augustine,
De doctrina christiana
, 2.2.3, ed. and trans. R.P.H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 56–59. See also R. A. Markus, “St. Augustine on Signs,”
Phronesis
2:1 (1957): 60–83, here, 70–76.

17
.   John 1:1–16.

18
.   Augustine,
On the Trinity
, bk. 15 (23), 194–95.

19
.   Augustine,
On the Trinity
, bk. 15 (20), 187. On the Christological underpinnings of Augustine’s theory of language, truth, and lies, see Mark D. Jordan, “Words and Word: Incarnation and Signification in Augustine’s
De Doctrina Christiana
,”
Augustinian Studies
11 (1980): 177–96, and Thomas Feehan, “The Morality of Lying in St. Augustine,”
Augustinian Studies
21 (1990): 67–81.

20
.   Augustine,
On the Trinity
, bk. 15 (20), 189. Eileen Sweeney, “Hugh of St. Victor: The Augustinian Tradition of Sacred and Secular Reading Revised,” in
Reading and Wisdom: The
De Doctrina Christiana
of Augustine in the Middle Ages
, ed. Edward D. English (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 61–83, notes that Augustine makes similar arguments in the
De doctrina christiana
.

21
.   Augustine,
On the Trinity
, bk. 12 (16), p. 94. See Paul J. Griffiths’s excellent discussion,
Lying: An Augustinian Theology of Duplicity
(Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004), 85–100, from which I have learned quite a bit.

22
.   Augustine,
City of God
, bk. 14, ch. 3, 586.

23
.   Augustine,
On Lying
, in
Treatises on Various Subjects
, ch. 3 (3), 55–56. See also Thomas Feehan, “Augustine on Lying and Deception,”
Augustinian Studies
19 (1988):131–39.

24
.   Augustine,
Against Lying
, ch. 12 (26), 160.

25
.   Augustine,
On Lying
, ch. 4 (4), 59 (with minor alterations to the translation). He reaches the same conclusion after a similar analysis of scenarios at ch. 13 (22), 81–82, and in
Soliloquies
, trans. Thomas F. Gilligan (New York: CIMA Publishing, Co., 1948), bk. 2, ch. 9 (16), 399, where he distinguishes the falsity of storytellers from that of deceivers.

26
.   I follow Griffiths,
Lying
, 29, who writes, “Duplicity is, to say it again, the evil proper to lying, and I read Augustine as claiming that this is both necessary and sufficient for the lie. That the lie is usually also accompanied by an intention to deceive is true and of interest, but it does not pick out what is most deeply characteristic of the lie, and is not relevant to the exceptionless ban on the lie that Augustine advocates.”

27
.   Augustine,
Against Lying
, ch. 15 (32), 166.

28
.   Augustine,
On Lying
, 14 (25), 86–88.

29
.   Augustine,
On Lying
, ch. 21 (42 and 43), 109.

30
.   Augustine,
Against Lying
, ch. 15 (32), 165–66.

31
.   Augustine,
Against Lying
, ch. 9 (20), 147. The story of Lot, his guests, and his daughters can be found at Genesis 19:1–11.

32
.   The story about the midwives appears at Exodus 1:19, Jacob’s claim to be Esau at Genesis 27:1–40, Abraham’s assertion that Sarah is his sister at Genesis 20:2, and Jesus’s long walk at Luke 24:28.

33
.   Augustine,
Against Lying
, ch. 15 (31), 164.

34
.   Augustine,
On Lying
, ch. 8 (11), 70–71.

35
.   Augustine,
Against Lying
, ch. 15 (32–33), 165–67.

36
.   Augustine,
Against Lying
, ch. 10 (23), 151–52.

37
.   Augustine,
Against Lying
, ch. 10 (24), 152–53.

38
.   Augustine,
On Lying
, ch. 5 (7), 62.

39
.   Augustine,
Against Lying
, ch. 10 (24), 152–55.

40
.   Lombard,
The Sentences
III, dist. XXXVIII, chs. 1–6, 156–61. Marcia Colish kindly confirmed this suspicion when I asked her about it via e-mail.

41
.   Aquinas,
Summa of Theology
II-II, quest. 110, art. 3, resp., in 1666.

42
.   Aquinas,
Summa of Theology
II-II, quest. 109, art. 3, resp. and replies 1 and 3, 1662–63.

43
.   Aquinas,
Summa of Theology
II-II, quest. 110, art. 1, resp., 1664. This reading of Thomas is much indebted to John Finnis,
Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 154–63.

44
.   I follow Griffiths,
Lying
, 173–75, who makes this observation about Thomas.

45
.   Aquinas,
Summa Contra Gentiles
III, trans. Vernon J. Bourke (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), cap. 12, n. 7, 65, cited and interpreted (though not quoted) in Finnis,
Aquinas
, 161, ft. 138.

46
.   John Buridan,
Super decem libros ethicorum
(Paris, 1513, rprt. Frankfurt: Minerva G.M.B.H., 1968), LXXXVIIIr. Dante offers a markedly similar account of the dehumanizing effects of lying in the
Inferno
. See Joan Ferrante, “The Relation of Speech to Sin in the Inferno,”
Dante Studies
87 (1969): 33–46.

47
.   Aquinas,
Summa of Theology
II-II, quest. 110, art. 3, reply 4, 1667. Zagorin,
Ways of Lying
, 28–31, notes the future importance of Thomas’s creative reinterpretation of Augustine’s exegesis. He ignores the significance of Thomas’s alignment of truth and justice.

48
.   For the story of Bishop Firmus, see Augustine,
On Lying
, ch. 13 (23), 84–85. Emily Corran, “Hiding the Truth: Exegetical Discussions of Abraham’s Lies from Hugh of Saint Victor to Stephen Langton,”
Historical Research
(forthcoming), demonstrates that twelfth-century theologians were already debating how to make sense of Augustine’s discussion of Abraham’s claim that Sarah was his sister.

49
.   Alexander of Hales,
Summa theologica
, vol. 4 (Quaracchi: Rome, 1979), pars II, inq. III, tractatus II, sect. I, quaest. II, titulus VIII, cap. VI, 582A/B. The jury is still out on the complete authenticity of this treatise and the extent to which it contains redactions and interpolations from Alexander’s students, especially Jean de la Rochelle. On the treatise’s authorship and its continuing importance as a marker of mid-thirteenth-century Franciscan theology, see Casagrande and Vecchio,
Les péchés de la langue
, 143–44. For convenience, I will refer only to Alexander as the author.

50
.   Alexander of Hales,
Summa theologica
, inq. III, tractatus III, sect. II, quaest. II, cap. I, vol. 3, 402, and pars II, inq. III, vol. 4, 581b.

51
.   This interpretation would prove controversial, and both Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus would reject it. The story can be found at 2 Kings 10.

52
.   Summarizing this lengthy section, Alexander of Hales,
Summa theologica
, pars II, inq. III, tractatus II, sect. I, quaest. I, vol. 4, 581a/b, writes: “Dicendum ergo generaliter quod mendacium de se dicit vituperabile et contrarium veritati, et ideo non potest recte fieri, sive sit in voluntate, sicut primo modo, sive in facto, sicut secundo modo, sive in dicto, sicet tertio modo. Solvendum ergo per interemptionem, cum dicit quod mendacium potest esse licitum in operibus simulatis. Non est enim mendacium simulatio cautelae vel doctrinae vel figurae in facto, sed illa quae est duplicitatis et fallaciae.”

53
.   John Duns Scotus,
In librum tertium sententiarum
, dist. 38, quaest. 1, art. 1. For a facing-page translation of the entire question, see John Duns Scotus,
Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality
, trans. Allan B. Wolter (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 484–85. Richard Cross, “Duns Scotus on Goodness, Justice, and What God Can Do,”
Journal of Theological Studies
48 (1997): 67, n. 61, corrects several defects in Wolter’s Latin text. For a concise summary of Scotus’s conception of the relation between voluntarism and ethics, see Richard Cross,
Duns Scotus
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 89–95. Scotus, Cross suggests, 192, n. 79, probably holds that while lying is not intrinsically evil, it can never be in accord with the intrinsic nature of things. “After all,” Cross writes, “God can dispense from the obligation not to lie; and we presumably would want to claim that under such circumstances lying is not morally bad.” For an overview of thirteenth-century ethical debates about voluntarism, see Bonnie Kent,
Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century
(Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995).

54
.   Scotus,
In librum tertium sententiarum
, dist. 38, quaest. 1, art. 1, opinio 3, 486–87.

55
.   Scotus,
In librum tertium sententiarum
, dist. 38, quaest. 1, art. 2, ad. 4, in
Duns Scotus
, 496–97.