The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment

by Dallas G. Denery II

  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.

  PART ONE

  Theologians Ask the Question

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Devil

  SIX DAYS AND TWO SENTENCES LATER

  It took God six days to create the world and the Devil two sentences to undo it.

  Until sometime in the seventeenth century, most every European, Catholic and Protestant alike, agreed that Moses had recorded these events in the first three chapters of Genesis. They also agreed on the general outline of Moses’s narrative, filling in missing details to transform it into the first step in the increasingly drawn-out history of human salvation. According to this story, God speaks the world into existence. “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ ” we read at Genesis 1:3, “and there was light.” On the sixth day, after creating Adam and placing him in the Garden of Eden, God sets forth one final command, a rule to be followed. “You may freely eat of every tree in the garden,” he tells Adam, “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” God’s words are powerful, they are creative, and they are absolute. The Devil’s words are by no means as powerful as God’s, but they are efficient, and their efficiency carries its own type of unsettling power. If God’s words create order and goodness out of nothingness, the Devil’s words create disorder out of what is good. Appearing in the guise of a serpent before the Woman in the Garden of Eden, the Devil asks, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the Garden?’ ” The Woman responds, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’ ” Moses never explains how the Woman learned this command, nor does he tell us why she adds the prohibition against touching the tree. With a maximum of narrative simplicity, he simply records the Devil’s second sentence: “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

  After this everything changes. The Woman sees that the tree is “good for food and a delight to the eyes.” She eats some of its fruit, offers it to Adam, who is “with her,” and he eats as well. Suddenly, their eyes opened, they recognize their nakedness and cover themselves with fig leaves. When God calls for them, they hide, fearful because they are not dressed. There follow more words—questions, answers, defenses, curses, punishments. Adam blames the Woman for giving him the fruit to eat. The Woman blames the serpent. These words engender further transformations. God announces that the Woman will suffer pains in childbirth and that her husband will rule over her. Adam will now toil for his food, gathering plants from the fields of a newly cursed earth that will bring forth little more than “thorns and thistles.” Adam names the woman “Eve,” and God drives the two of them out of Eden, placing angels and a flaming sword at its entrance to prevent them from ever approaching the Tree of Life.

  Throughout all this, the serpent, now condemned to crawl on its belly, to live on dust and in constant enmity with the Woman, remains silent. Of course, the Devil, having achieved everything he had hoped to achieve, has no reason to say anything else. And he did it all with a few simple words, one or two sentences, a question and a statement. “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden?’ ” he asks. “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil,” he states.

  THE DEVIL AND THE LIE

  Surprisingly, especially given their prominent role in the opening chapters of Genesis, Adam and Eve soon vanish from the Hebrew Bible, never to be mentioned again after Genesis 5:3–5, when we learn that Adam lived for 800 years after the birth of his son Seth, dying, finally, at the age of 930.1 By contrast, Adam is mentioned several times in the New Testament. While Luke traces Jesus’s lineage, albeit through Joseph, all the way back to “Seth, son of Adam, son of God,”2 it is in Paul’s epistles to the Romans and Corinthians that Adam achieves his singular importance for Christian theology as “a type of the one who was to come.”3 “[S]in,” Paul writes, “came into the world through one man, and death came from sin.” He immediately puts names to deeds when he adds, “Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam.”4 For Paul, Jesus’s crucifixion makes sense only in the light of Adam’s violation of God’s prohibition against eating from the Tree of Knowledge. “Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all,” he adds, “so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all.” And, just in case the notion of trespass might prove too subtle and vague a specification of the crime committed, Paul clarifies: “For just as by one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.”5

  Given the weight Paul placed on Adam’s sin, it is hardly surprising that subsequent Christian writers would return again and again to the frustratingly brief story of the Temptation, to Adam and to Eve and, especially, to the serpent.6 Already in the early fifth century, the North African bishop Augustine, summarizing a tradition that had built up around Paul’s letters while giving it a form that would influence every subsequent religious writer, would lament the catastrophic consequences of the Fall. “For because of [Adam and Eve’s] sin,” he writes in The City of God, “human nature was made subject to all the great corruption that we see and feel, and so to death also … and so [mankind] became very different from what he had been when he dwelt in Paradise before his sin.”7 Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, the early sixth-century bishop of Gaul and the first Christian to rewrite the Creation story as a pastoral poem, was, if anything, more blunt and certainly more to the point. “To you Adam, our first father,” he writes at the very beginning of his poem The Beginning of the World, “I shall attribute the cause of mankind’s various sufferings, to you the reason why our mortal life possesses so brief a span.”8 Things looked no better nearly a millennium later. When Martin Luther, during the decade leading up to his death in 1545, considered the Temptation and Fall in his Lectures on Genesis, he stressed their enormous and continuing consequences, consequences that can be appreciated only if “we look back at that image of the state of innocence … in which the will was upright and the reason was sound.” We must, in other words, return to the first chapters of Genesis and compare what life was like for Adam and Eve before the Fall with what it is like now. Luther assured his readers that it was a contrast horrible in its implications. As a result of the Fall, we had lost “a most beautifully enlightened reason,” and our will had lost its natural concord with God. The Fall had extinguished the body’s glory “so that now it
is a matter of the utmost disgrace to be seen naked,” and left our flesh burning with passions that have turned us into enemies of God.9 None of this had been the case when Adam and Eve lived in innocence, when they were naked together without shame, without lust.

  Genesis not only explained what we had been, what we had become, and what we continue to be, it also explained how that transformation occurred. It placed our current state of misery within the context of God’s Creation of the universe, while tracing it to a specific series of events. A grand cosmological narrative set the stage for a seemingly simple story involving a tree, a snake, two human beings, and God, a story that began with the prohibition against eating from the Tree of Knowledge, and from there proceeded as if inexorably to the serpent’s temptation of the Woman, to the eating of the forbidden fruit and, finally, to human exile from paradise. For early Christian, medieval, and Reformation writers, the specific details of how the first couple fell were no less important than knowledge of what that Fall had cost the human race. Those details may have been even more important, more relevant. Eve may have been the first person to be tempted, but she certainly was not the last. “Some people are puzzled by this temptation of the first man,” Augustine writes in his extended commentary, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, a work he began in 401, “wondering why God allowed it to happen, as if they do not see that in our days the whole human race is unceasingly tempted by the snares of the devil.”10 The first temptation offered Christians something like a prototype and modus operandi for all future temptations, what the sixteenth-century Italian Protestant convert and religious exile Jacobus Acontius referred to as the stratagematvm satanae, an alliteration that found its way into the 1648 English translation of his book Satans Strategems or the Devils Cabinet-Counsel Discovered.11