The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment
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Women lie, but doesn’t everyone? In the book of Psalms, David famously proclaimed that every man is a liar, and who could disagree with that judgment? Certainly not John of Salisbury, who invoked David’s authority in the opening pages of his Policraticus. The court, John writes, teems with liars, flatterers, and slanderers leaving us with no choice but to lie in our own self-defense, to beguile the beguilers. The man of eminence resorts to lying and simulation out of necessity, as a last expedient in a world in which no other strategy will succeed in bringing about the good. Christine agreed. In The Treasure of the City of Ladies, she counsels princesses and noblewomen to practice simulation and holy pretense in order to protect themselves from the envious backbiters who everywhere surround them.
Every man is a liar, and every woman too, but that hardly renders them or their lies equal, hardly renders identical their place in the world and the challenges they must overcome. To hear John tell it, the courtier’s need to lie is less a reflection of who he is than of the impossibly confused and confounding world in which he finds himself. He lies, but he is not a liar. Not so for the princess or noblewoman, at least not simply so and certainly not so simply. Even if necessity and charity motivate her deceptions, trustworthy authority affirms that when women lie they lie because they are women, as if the effects of the Fall had somehow bypassed men, only to be redoubled in feminine nature itself. Why are women so talkative, so prone to falsehood, idle gossip, and argument? Jehan found one answer in the book of Genesis: “Because they are made of bone, while our bodies are fashioned of clay: bone makes more noise than clay…. It is their nature that makes them foolish and proud.”13
When a woman lies, she lies because she is a woman, and every woman is a liar. This is the lesson Christine learns in her study the morning she skims through Jehan le Fèvre’s poetic slanders and reflects on well over twelve hundred years of endlessly repeated authority transmitted in the form of religious doctrine, natural philosophy, and stories, poems and plays, jokes and anecdotes. After all, Jehan and Jean de Meun were hardly saying anything new. Augustine’s spiritual mentor, the bishop Ambrose of Milan, had already set the stage for their literary productions when, in midst of his commentary on Genesis, he pointed out that it was hardly surprising which sex sinned first.14 Prior to Ambrose, Tertullian, the Carthaginian convert to Christianity who died in A.D. 225, had already raised the proclaimed dangers of women to hyperbolic extremes when he infamously condemned all women. “Do you not believe that you are (each) an Eve?” he exclaims. “The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives on even in our times and so it is necessary that the guilt should live on, also. You are the one who opened the door to the Devil, you are the one who first plucked the fruit of the forbidden tree, you are the one who first deserted the divine law; you are the one who persuaded him whom the Devil was not strong enough to attack. All too easily you destroyed the image of God, man. Because of your desert, that is, death, even the son of God had to die.”15
Variations on Tertullian’s and Ambrose’s laments would reverberate through the centuries, through the Middle Ages in the writings of Jehan le Fèvre, Jean de Meun, and so many others, and long after them, in mushrooming crops of plays and pastoralia, witchcraft manuals, and philosophical treatises. Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger gave voice to such condemnation in their notorious late fifteenth-century work The Hammer of Witches when they stressed that women are naturally more susceptible to demonic influence and evil because of their incredible credulity, their slippery tongues, weak intellect, and uncontrollable carnality.16 Easily deceived, women find it even easier to deceive. Or so it might seem. But situations like this require caution.
When potential deception lurks everywhere, both within us and without, we have no choice but to proceed with care, to question, to reflect, and to doubt. This is John of Salisbury’s advice to the man of eminence: be skeptical and never mistake mere appearances for reality, flattery for truth. Virtuous action requires self-knowledge, and lacking that we can only lose ourselves to vice, and the lies we fall for will be the lies that undo us. A lesson Christine takes to heart: she uses the opening pages of The City of Ladies to dramatize the mechanisms—the religious, the scientific, and philosophical arguments, even the civic institutions and traditions—that men use to demean and oppress women, to convince women of their alleged inferiority and inescapably deceitful nature. Christine understood that the question Is it ever acceptable to lie? would always be a more difficult question when asked about women, when asked by women, because the weight of tradition had worked to blind women to their own true nature. In order to answer the question Is it ever acceptable for women to lie? Christine realized that she would first have to learn who she was and that this knowledge could be acquired only through methodical excavation and critique of the misogynist tradition itself, a tradition that would have to be understood before it could be refuted, debunked before it could be replaced. To borrow Christine’s own metaphor, she would first have to clear away the accumulated dirt of male slander before she could lay out the true foundation of female virtue.17
And there was a lot of dirt to excavate. The misogynist discourse that not only supported the claim that every woman is a liar but made it sound reasonable depended on ideas that, at times, might seem at best tangentially related to the problem of lies and lying. This was its power, this was how it convinced. Its claims cohered so fully with a much larger and diverse set of authoritative scientific and religious ideas that the inherently mendacious nature of all women seemed to flow from them like logical corollaries. Christine first, and then those she inspired, would search out these hidden assumptions in order to clarify the disparate elements that sustained the belief that all women are liars. Since the misogynists depended so profoundly on a certain understanding of what transpired in the Garden of Eden, it became necessary to return to the first pages of Genesis to determine precisely what they believed it taught about women. Similarly, since the misogynists also believed that natural philosophy, the disciplines of medicine and biology, confirmed and extended the conclusions of their biblical exegesis, it became necessary to understand why they believed the biological differences between men and women rendered women inconstant and deceptive. Only by revealing and critiquing these traditions and ideas could Christine and her heirs begin to reframe and redirect them, replacing a theory of feminine deceit with an account of human nature.
ALL ABOUT EVE, ALL ABOUT WOMEN
If Rupert of Deutz is sure of anything, he is sure that the evils of women reach back to Genesis, to the Garden of Eden, and to the very first recorded words a woman ever spoke.
In his commentary on the Bible’s opening book, Rupert, a twelfth-century Benedictine monk and theologian, lingers over each and every word of the Woman’s response to the serpent’s question, words that prove the corruption, weakness, and fickleness of her mind. The serpent, incorrectly phrasing God’s prohibition against eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, asks, “Why has God forbidden you from eating from every tree in the Garden?” The Woman, unwilling to ignore the serpent, proves equally unwilling to restate God’s prohibition verbatim. She changes it, simultaneously strengthening one part, weakening another, while altering yet a third. She strengthens it when she falsely claims, not only that God has forbidden them from eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but also that he has prohibited the first couple from even touching it. She immediately goes on to undermine God’s prohibition when she introduces a hint of doubt about the consequences of violating God’s law—“lest perchance we will die,” she informs the serpent. Finally, Rupert, almost alone among commentators, observes that the Woman actually misidentifies the forbidden tree. “We may eat of the trees in the garden,” she states, “but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the tree that is in the middle of garden.’ ” But this is simply false, Rupert notes. God placed the Tree of Life at the center of the garden, and he certainly did not prohibit them from eating from it.18
A general lesson maybe, but a lesson that inevitably explains more about the Woman than Adam, more about women than men. Rupert argues at length that Eve does not merely see the tree, eat from it, and hand the fruit to Adam. She sees that it is good for food and a delight to the eyes. She gazes at it, contemplates it. She knows God’s threat and the serpent’s promise, and she must judge between them. Unfortunately, the serpent’s words already have infected her with pride and desire, have confused her so that she no longer understands the import of God’s prohibition. Rupert invokes a distinction between our interior and exterior eyes. Her interior eyes now darkened with concupiscence, she no longer fears transgressing God’s mandate but only delights in the tree’s apparent beauty. Looking at it, she concludes that God has lied and the serpent speaks the truth. How could this tree cause death when its fruit looks so good to eat, when it is so delightful to the eyes? Appearances and surfaces, the superficial and the transitory, sway her, and then she sways Adam. The Apostle Paul assures us that only the Woman was deceived, not the man, and so Rupert concludes, “By compelling rather than deceiving, by enjoining more than pretending, she accomplishes this, so that the man obeys her voice rather than God’s.” However she accomplished it, she accomplished it with lying words, and those words welled up from a pride-filled and lustful soul, words that concealed a horrible truth behind their falsely promised pleasures.20
Nothing Rupert describes is particularly original, but that is the value of his commentary. With its occasional rhetorical flourish for added froth, Rupert’s commentary flows along the very mainstream of the tradition, caught up in its most basic assumptions about Eve and women. Already in the sixth century, Alcimus Avitus, bishop of Gaul, would describe Eve as prone to pride, “open to seduction … too ready to believe … [and] perversely gullible.”21 And everyone agreed that Eve was the lesser of the two first humans, formed second, from Adam’s rib. Augustine would take this as evidence that she lacked reason, certainly lacked Adam’s reason. In the thirteenth-century treatise The Golden Legend, Jacobus Voragine would cite Eve’s inferiority as the reason the serpent approached her and not her husband: “she was not so prudent and more prone to slide and bow.”22 Vincent of Beauvais would give this interpretation his encyclopedic stamp of approval later in the same century when he linked Eve’s natural inferiority to her creation after Adam. “For the woman is the glory of the man, not the image of God … and more, the woman is under the man, and since she is not the origin of everything, as he is, and she was not made by God immediately, but formed from the man’s side, and because she did not have reason from the start, as did the man, whence she was seduced by the Devil, not the man.”23 Seduced by words and appearances, she seduces with words and appearances.
Greek and Roman literature, scripture, even Aristotelian and Galenic ideas about the body and medicine made it easy for the Church fathers to equate all women with Eve and to allow Eve’s actions to reveal the true nature of all women. Individual women, whether virtuous or vicious, vanished into the abstract notion of “woman,” a universalized essence impervious to anything so transitory as a writer’s actual experience with real women. Those same lines from Paul’s letter to Timothy declaring that only the Woman, not Adam, was deceived also made it clear that Eve’s subjection to Adam named every woman’s permanent state in a fallen world. Women were to dress simply, without unnecessary adornment, with their heads covered and, most important, they were not to speak. “Let a woman learn in silence,” Paul writes, “with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.”24 The Glossa Ordinaria, quoting extensively from Augustine’s exegesis of Genesis at this point in Paul’s letter, makes clear that it was the Woman’s frailty, her failure to obey, her attempt to speak and teach, that rest at the heart of women’s current subjection to man.25 Silence: the imposed penalty for having rephrased God’s prohibition to the serpent and for turning the serpent’s wiles on Adam.
But women didn’t need to speak to lie. In his third-century treatise On Female Apparel, Tertullian, having bluntly asserted that every woman is an Eve, quickly adds that there is more than one way to tarnish God’s Word. When a woman paints her face with rouge or powder, her mouth with lipstick, when she decorates herself with silver or gold or jewels, dresses in elaborate and richly colored clothing, she effectively criticizes God, suggesting with every daub of makeup another way he could have improved on his work. Invoking language reminiscent of John the Revelator’s warning against altering even the slightest word of scripture, Tertullian contends that women censure God “when they amend, when they add to, his work; taking these additions, of course, from the adversary artificer. That adversary artificer the devil. For who would show the way to change the body, but he who by wickedness transfigured man’s spirit?” Women recapitulate the Fall when they adorn themselves and, at the root of the Fall, at the root of all sin, is the lie. “How unworthy of the name Christian that you bear!” Tertullian rages, “To have a painted face, you on whom simplicity in every form is enjoined! To lie in your appearance, you to whom lying with the tongue is not allowed…. To commit adultery in your appearance, you who should eagerly strive after modesty! … How can you keep the commandments of God if you do not keep in your own persons the features which He has bestowed on you?”26 For Tertullian, when Adam and Eve cover themselves with leaves and hide among the trees of the Garden, they do not merely symbolize the lying words they will soon use to conceal and excuse their transgression against God. They are discovering new methods of deceit and simulation.
Although Tertullian warns men against adorning themselves, his real concern is with women because women are essentially connected to adornment, to amendment, and excess. “Female toilet,” Tertullian writes, “has two possible purposes—dress and make-up,” and dress and makeup serve only two purposes: to satisfy female ambition and to prostitute the body.27 But just as women do not need to speak to lie, they do not even need to go to the trouble of caring for their appearance to attract the male gaze. A woman’s mere presence can ignite carnal yearnings better left unlit in men, leaving them helpless before the temptation that is the female sex. While a woman’s natural “comeliness is not to be censured,” Tertullian explains, “as being a bodily happiness, as being an additional gift of the divine Sculptor, and as a kind of fair vestment of the soul, it must be feared because of the affront and violence on the part of those who pursue it.”28 Simply put, a woman’s body is little different from cosmetics and fine clothes. Just as the latter adorn the body, the former adorns the soul. Women are naturally adorned, naturally fictitious and deceitful. They are natural liars, and this means that it is never enough for women to reject “the display of false and studied beauty.” They must use “concealment and negligence” to obliterate even their “natural grace.” Being a woman is synonymous with seduction and deception. It doesn’t matter
that a woman has no intention of arousing the man whose leer lands on her. It does not even matter that she is utterly unaware of the effect she has on him. It does not matter, because she is a temptress nonetheless and despite herself, by her very nature. She deceives simply in virtue of being a woman in the presence of a man who (unknown to her) desires her, who mentally performs the deed that a lust-filled gaze inspires. Perhaps she is not guilty, but odium and infamy attach to her nonetheless as the unwitting sword of man’s perdition.29
A woman is her body, and it is her body that defines her. If her body is a “garment of her soul,” then, like any garment, it is a covering, something extra, an alteration and correction always bordering on the precipice of sin. Tertullian’s identification of women with the body and deception fell in line with, would draw from and in turn nourish, a long tradition that identified men with the soul and with reason, women with the body and the senses. The first-century Jewish exegete Philo of Alexandria exploits this tradition in his commentary on Genesis when he resignedly notes that the joy and perfection of paradise could never have lasted long. Nothing is stable in this world, and eventually something had to give. Scripture quickly proves his pessimism true when the Woman arrives on the scene and, with her, the start “of a blameworthy life.”30 Philo reads the entire Temptation scene as an allegory for the soul itself. Adam symbolizes reason, the Woman symbolizes the body’s senses, and the serpent symbolizes all those many pleasures that seep in through the senses and deceive the soul.31 Although subsequent commentators, such as Origin and Ambrose, would pick up on Philo’s allegory, it merely made explicit what even the most literal of expositors would find in the story of the Fall. The serpent tempts the Woman with promises of power and pleasure, it plays on her senses, her ears and her eyes, her sense of touch and taste. The Woman is fickle, persuadable, inconstant, easily confused, lacking in self-control—and without self-control, Philo observes, “the soul softens and tends towards death.”32