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

by Dallas G. Denery II

  Wyclif had many reasons for rejecting the dogma of the bodily presence of Christ in the Eucharist, reasons related to his own rather singular physical and metaphysical theories, as well as to his reading of scripture and the decisions of Church councils.64 Even the nature of Eucharistic adoration among the laity throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the ever-intensifying and passionate desire to see the host during mass, the explosion of miracle tales, reliquaries, and the popularity of Corpus Christi festivals played a part in convincing him that the religious beliefs and practices of his fellow Christians had gone seriously offtrack.65 Implicated in all these reasons is something even more fundamental, a logical and moral imperative that for Wyclif defines God’s very nature and essence. Given that God made us to be creatures who “naturally seek to know the truth,” who make inferences about what exists based on what we see, God would be violating his own wishes, entangling himself in self-contradictions were he to lead our senses astray, especially in something so important as the celebration of the Last Supper.66 The epistemological consequences of such deception would be devastating. It would undermine every system of knowledge and render our every certitude about the world worthless. Appearances would have no necessary connection to reality, and the evidence of our senses would be rendered meaningless.67 We would find ourselves like the ancient skeptics, affirming that nothing can be known, asserting nothing but affirmations of our own ignorance. From our perspective, the world would become nothing but a “ball of accidents,” all surface and no depth, forever misleading, deceiving, damning. We would be unable to know the truth of our vows, of our faith, of our sanctity, of scripture itself.

  “I am horrified,” Wyclif writes suddenly and without warning in the middle of a sermon on the importance of charity, “at the very idea that a quality or any sort of accident could exist on its own and not inhere in a substance.”68 Wyclif’s horror at this moment certainly has something to do with the nightmare of a world made unknowable, but its emotional register derives from a related and much more ominous possibility. If illusory appearances can exist in the world, then why can’t they also exist within our own souls? What if we could perceive the presence of charity within ourselves and yet still be damned? God’s deceptions, no longer limited to the external world, would infiltrate our souls, would render us invisible to ourselves. But none of this is possible, or so Wyclif claims, because God is all-powerful and deception is incompatible with omnipotence. A litany of Catholic thinkers from Augustine in the fourth century to Aquinas in the thirteenth century would have agreed with this assertion, but then again, as we have seen, many of those same Catholic thinkers also believed the Bible offered evidence of some very significant divinely instigated deceptions. Wyclif simply refused to accept this apparent or potential lapse between divine nature and divine conduct.

  Think what one will of this drive for utter consistency, Wyclif’s was a lonely road leading to a future in which Church authorities would one day disinter his corpse only to rebury it in unhallowed ground. While much of his vehement rhetoric takes shape against a Church that he believes has been co-opted by Antichrist and now teaches the Devil’s heresies, his anger extends to his fourteenth-century peers, to theologians such as Ockham and Holkot who had played a central role in developing and disseminating those lies. For these thinkers, Wyclif complains, omnipotence is no guarantee of divine honesty but rather an excuse to indulge in the most sophistical of inquiries. Rather than search for necessary truths, for actual truths, rather than investigate the world as God created it, Wyclif believes that all too many of his predecessors had become obsessed with their own fantasies, imagining all the various things an omnipotent God could do, not what he had actually done, accepting the fiction that God could deceive as truth rather than accepting the God of Truth.69 When Wyclif argues that it makes no sense to worry about everything that God could do, that we must limit ourselves to “the order actually imposed,” he is doing nothing other than stabilizing the natural order by exiling the possibility of miracles and divine intervention.70 To imagine anything else, to imagine a world in which God could randomly intervene to create accidents without substances, appearances without reality, is to imagine a world of absurdities in which human reason could no longer function as God himself had designed it to. Wyclif purchases the possibility of human knowledge at the expense of God’s unbridled interference in the world.

  At the risk of oversimplification, it is entirely possible that the difference between Holkot and Wyclif comes down to the problem of starting points and perspective. Holkot’s discussion assumes the perspective of divine omnipotence and finds a way for human beings to accommodate themselves to God’s ever mysterious, if ever rational, ways. Perhaps we have to give up the guarantee of certainty and intelligibility, but we gain the confidence that God will judge our best efforts to be enough. Wyclif, by contrast, frames his discussion of omnipotence in terms of the natural order. God’s actions must conform themselves to the world, which is the necessary expression of his just and perfect creative power. Whereas Holkot offers a more expansive vision of God’s range of actions, in which whatever God does will be just and appropriate by definition, Wyclif at moments seems to restrict God’s actions in terms of their consequences, in terms of the impact they will have on human beings.

  Holkot and Wyclif offer diametrically opposed responses to the threat of divine deception, and each in his own way points to the future, to the hidden and inscrutable God of the reformers and to the infinitely rational God of the scientists.

  LUTHER, CALVIN, AND THE HIDDEN GOD

  Luther tells a familiar story that leaves us with a familiar paradox.

  “A fisherman deceives a fish by enticing it with bait,” Luther writes, “and it is not unreasonable on the part of the [Church] fathers to apply this to Christ.” Drawing on the imagery that Gregory of Nyssa had bequeathed to the Church, Luther describes how Christ “came into the world clothed in flesh and was cast into the water like a hook. The bait of his humanity concealed his “eternal and unconquerable majesty.” Fooled, “the devil struck at the hook of his divinity and by it all his power as well as the power of death and hell was overcome.” Luther has no doubt that Christ “shamefully deluded and deceived” Satan, who “thought that he would kill a man and was himself being killed after being decoyed by Him into a trick.” So much the worse for Satan as far as Luther is concerned, and he happily attributes the entire charade to God’s “wonderful counsel,” a glorious example of the adage “that cunning might deceive cunning.”71

  Luther again invokes the classic image of the fishhook in the course of discussing another famous bit of biblically based deception. Genesis 27 tells of how Isaac, now old, near death, and practically blind, asks Esau, the firstborn of his twin sons, to bring him a meal of freshly slaughtered game so that he may bless him before he dies. Isaac’s wife Rebecca overhears this discussion and wishing that the younger son Jacob receive the blessing instead, orders him to impersonate his older brother. Esau is a notably hairy man, so Rebecca advises Jacob to cover his hands and neck with goatskin (should Isaac wish to touch his son) and to bring his father a meal of freshly butchered farm animals. When Isaac asks, “Are you really my son Esau?” Jacob answers, “I am,” and receives Isaac’s blessing. Luther freely admits, as he did when making sense of Christ’s human disguise, that “in the sight of men” there can be no question that Jacob’s behavior reeks of “fraud and deceit,” but then again, what men think hardly matters in a case like this. “When the saints perpetrate a fraud,” Luther explains, “and have a command of God in regard to it, then, although it is a fraud in the sight of men, yet it is a saintly, legitimate and pious fraud.” The Israelites were in the right when they defrauded and despoiled the Egyptians because God had commanded that they do these things, just as Jacob is justified because God’s prophecy had already granted him the rights of primogeniture. As Luther succinctly puts it, “To contrive a plot and to take away from another by
deceit what God has given to you is not a sin.”72 Evidently what applies to the saints applies to the divine as well, and God’s use of lies, deceit, and fraud against the Devil to recover his own is no less justified than Jacob’s hirsute costume and lying self-identification. Luther seals this interpretation with a lengthy nod to the divine fishhook.

  In the writings of Luther and Calvin, the language of truth and falsity, honesty and deception, becomes hopelessly entangled within the inscrutable mystery of God. If Luther happily and graphically draws on the image of the fraudulent fishhook, he also proclaims God as the God of truth, the God who cannot lie. Catholic theologians, of course, had been struggling to overcome, resolve, or at least lessen the tensions of this apparent paradox for over a thousand years. Augustine had introduced the popular distinction between what God wills as opposed to what he merely permits, but since this solution seemed ill suited to deal with Christ’s personal deceptions of the Devil, theologians developed other responses to remove any apparent blasphemy from God’s actions. Christ’s deeds were prudent, appropriate, and justified given the circumstances and his own intentions. Even Holkot, who did so much to expand the range of God’s potentially mischievous actions, arguing that whatever God does, deceptive or otherwise, is good and fitting by definition, sought to lessen the apparent contrast between appearance and reality when he suggested that God creates such deceptions infrequently and only if they entail some great benefit. Beneficial deceptions, Holkot notes, are not lies at all.

  Luther sidesteps all these philosophical intricacies and roots everything in the will and Word of God. What God wills he wills immutably, and what he promises he promises eternally. Abraham was promised that his descendants would one day be as numberless as the stars, but today God commands him to sacrifice his only son. “Even though there is a clear contradiction here,” Luther writes, “for there is nothing between death and life, Abraham nevertheless does not turn away from the promise but believes that his son will have descendants even if he dies.” Luther simply accepts the mystery at the very core of our relationship with God. Often it will seem as if God has forgotten us and the promises he has made to us, that he has gone back on them, revoked them. “This trial cannot be overcome,” Luther explains, “and is far too great to be understood by us. For there is a contradiction with which God contradicts Himself. It is impossible for the flesh to understand this; for it inevitably concludes either that God is lying—and this is blasphemy—or that God hates me—and this leads to despair.” For Abraham, for all of us, during moments like these when God seems to have deceived us, we “should hold fast to this comfort that what has once been declared, this He does not change.” Luther then adds for good measure, “For the fact that God cannot lie is sure and dependable.”73

  Perhaps God cannot lie, but how his actions are not evil, deceitful, and wrathful remains forever beyond our comprehension. Whereas medieval theologians had sought ways of making sense of God’s actions even while recognizing his omnipotence, Luther denies the very possibility of such understanding. God’s omnipotence renders him unknowable to us, hidden from us. Luther rejects entirely the notion that there can be anything like a similarity between human conceptions of justice and truth and God’s conceptions of those terms.74 God’s wrath hides his love, and his love takes the shape of Satan’s lying speech that urges us to flee the saving Word. Commenting on Psalm 177, Luther raises these paradoxes to dizzying heights: “God’s faithfulness and truth always must first become a great lie before it becomes truth. The world calls this truth heresy. And we, too, are constantly tempted to believe that God would abandon us and not keep his Word; and in our hearts He begins to become a liar,” Luther writes. “In short, God cannot be God unless He first becomes the Devil.”75 Everything depends on the distinction between “God preached and God hidden, that is, between the Word of God and God himself,” Luther writes against Dutch humanist Erasmus in The Bondage of the Will. “God does many things that he does not disclose to us in his word; he also wills many things which he does not disclose himself as willing in his word. Thus he does not will the death of a sinner according to his word; but he wills it according to his inscrutable will.”76

  From our perspective inscrutability may well seem like schizophrenia as God appears to be of two wills. Calvin, no less than Luther, stresses that God’s providential designs remain hidden from us in this life. It is impossible for us to know why the good suffer as the evil thrive and why, by his “horrible decree,” some are predestined to eternal torment. “But let us always remember,” Calvin writes in his Commentaries on Ezekiel, “that God’s judgments are not without reason called a profound abyss (Psalm 36:6), that when we see rebellious men acting as they do in these times, we should not wish to comprehend what far surpassed even the sense of the angels.”77 We should never doubt that whatever God does, he does for the sake of his church, even though it will remain impossible for us to understand. For Calvin, as it was for Luther, this extends to God’s apparent lies and deceptions. Calvin asks his readers to consider Ezekiel 14:9: “And if the prophet be deceived when he had spoken a thing, I the lord have deceived that prophet.” Calvin assures his readers that “God does not delight in such deception,” and even if “the cause is not always manifest … this is fixed, that God punishes men justly, when true religion is so rent asunder by division, and truth is obscured by falsehood.”78

  Calvin locates the possibility of divine deception in God’s omnipotence. Nothing happens in this world without God’s consent, and this extends from the actions of the angels to those of the demons, for just as the angels “dispense to us God’s benefits for our salvation,” so too do demons “execute his wrath.”79 And wrath can encompass deception. “Whatever be the explanation,” Calvin writes as he continues reflecting on the passage from Ezekiel, God “pronounces that he deceived the false prophets, because Satan could not order a single word unless he were permitted, and not only so, but even ordered.” Calvin then turns to the story of Micah who, alone of all the prophets, predicted the evil king Ahab’s demise. “I saw God sitting on his throne,” Micah tells Ahab, “and when all the armies of heaven were collected before him, God inquired, ‘Who shall deceive Ahab?’ And a spirit offered himself, namely, a devil, and said, I will deceive him, because I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. God answers, ‘Depart, thus it shall be.’ ”80 Nothing can be clearer than passages like these, Calvin contends. God does not merely permit his creatures to lie, he orders and commands them to lie, and such orders cannot be ignored, put aside or left incomplete.

  Having made clear that God can deceive, Calvin, again like Luther, retreats, if only a little. He recognizes that some people might object “that nothing is more remote from God’s nature than to deceive.” Terms that describe human actions, Calvin responds, can only be metaphorically ascribed to God. There are scriptural passages in which God ridicules his creatures, in which he laughs, sees, and even sleeps. “But we know,” Calvin adds, “that it is not agreeable to his nature to ridicule, to laugh, to see, and to sleep.” Nor is it agreeable to his nature to deceive. God is immutable in his judgments, passionless in his being, and unchanging in his essence. Providence unfolds with inexorable necessity, but the Bible often describes God’s will and work in simpler, less stern and abstract ways. Scripture, Calvin frequently notes, was written for a cruder people, less sophisticated and less educated. “And so in this place,” he writes, “there is an improper form of speaking but the sense is not doubtful—that all impostures are scattered abroad by God—since, Satan, as I have said, can never utter the slightest word unless commanded by God.” The story of Micah and Ahab makes clear how an eternal and unchanging God effects his deceptions. “God,” Calvin explains, “does not deceive, so to speak, without an agency, but uses Satan and imposters as organs of his vengeance.”81

  Whether God deceives personally or through agents, Calvin is unwilling to place responsibility for divinely inspired deception on anyone or a
nything except God. The Scholastic distinction between what God commands and what God allows cannot stand when confronted with these passages from scripture. “For that cannot be called mere permission when God willingly seeks for someone to deceive Ahab and then he himself orders Satan to go forth and do so.”82 Calvin is thrown back against the inscrutable nature of God’s judgment and providence. Occasionally God’s actions will appear to contradict his commands, and he will seem for all the world to be a liar. These are harsh realities, and Calvin realizes that “some people find difficulty in what we are now saying, namely, that there is no agreement between God and man, where man does by God’s just impulsion what he ought not to do.” For these people, for everyone really—they must simply accept God’s judgment. At this moment, Calvin looks to Augustine for support. “Who does not tremble at these judgments,” he writes, quoting from the bishop’s treatise On Grace and Free Will, “where God works even in evil men’s hearts whatever he wills, yet renders to them according their deserts?” If God chooses to reveal truths that exceed “our mental capacity,” there is nothing for it but to accept them. God has his reasons, and we must believe them with humility. “Those who too insolently scoff,” Calvin concludes, “even though it is clear enough that they are prating against God, are not worthy of a longer refutation.”83

  RENÉ DESCARTES, PIERRE BAYLE, AND THE END OF DIVINE DECEPTION

  To hear Pierre Bayle tell it, Descartes should have known his Bible better. If he had, Bayle informs the readers of his Historical and Critical Dictionary, a multivolume work that proved to be among the most popular books of the eighteenth century, Descartes would not have made “so weak a resistance” when critics pointed to scriptural evidence that God deceives.84 More, he would have recognized that the narrative of scripture teaches us almost nothing whatsoever about God.