Augustine’s older contemporary, Gregory of Nyssa, used different imagery to similar effect to describe Christ’s deception of the Devil. “The divine nature,” Gregory writes, “was concealed under the veil of our human nature so that, as with a greedy fish, the hook of divinity might be swallowed along with the bait of flesh.” According to Gregory, this sort of deception was perfectly fitting, perfectly just, for human beings themselves had long since fallen prey to a different sort of allegorically baited false food. “The heathen fable,” Gregory writes, “tells of a dog who caught sight of the reflection in the water of the food he was carrying in his mouth. He opened his mouth wide to swallow the reflection, and dropped the real food; and so went hungry.” Likewise, the Devil, “that advocate and inventor of wickedness,” had persuaded mankind to “the good with its opposite.” He covered the “hook of his wickedness” with “the false semblance of good,” and mankind, deceived and caught, became the captives of their worst enemy.18
Adam and Eve, as Gregory relates the story of our Fall, had sold themselves into bondage. They had handed over their freedom and willingly become Satan’s slaves in exchange for his false promises. God’s response to Satan’s double-dealing, Gregory contends, makes sense only within this dramatic narrative. We know that God is good and wise, that he is just and powerful. God feels pity for our fallen state, and through his wisdom he knows how best to rescue us. God could simply liberate mankind, but this would be an action fitting only for a tyrant. Justice requires that man’s freedom be purchased or ransomed from its current owner. Christ’s incarnation, his wondrous birth, and his miraculous life are all aspects of an extended charade to convince the Devil that the value of a sinless Christ exceeds that of all other sinful men combined. Christ’s excellent life is the bait, while Christ’s divinity, the hook, is hidden within the bait of his human flesh. As Gregory puts it, “It was beyond the Devil’s power to look upon the unveiled appearance of God; he would see only in Christ a part of the fleshly nature which he had of old subdued through wickedness.” This was, Gregory assures his readers, the only way the Devil would have handed over mankind. Had Christ appeared in his divinity, had he not hid himself behind a veil of flesh, the Devil would have been too fearful to make the exchange. Summarizing the story, Gregory praises each and every aspect of God’s plan, especially the deceptive ruse on which everything hinges. “His choosing to save man,” Gregory writes, “is evidence of his goodness; his making the ransoming of the captive a matter of exchange displays his justice; while his pre-eminent wisdom is demonstrated by the device by which something was accessible to the Enemy which had been beyond his grasp.”19
Whatever differences might exist between Augustine’s mousetrap and Gregory’s fishhook, both writers treat Christ’s incarnation, life, and crucifixion as part of a decades-long exchange, even dialogue, with the Devil.20 When God deceives the Devil, God is justified because both the specific circumstances of man’s Fall and God’s intentions warrant and justify such deception. Like an immoral sophist, the Devil convinced Eve willingly to give up her freedom, persuading her that evil was good and good was evil. Reciprocity, fairness, even justice, demand that mankind’s freedom be secured in some similar manner, and so it is that Christ engages in a series of negotiations with the Devil as he attempts to persuade the Devil to accept his life in exchange for the rest of mankind’s freedom. Christ can succeed in this drawn out exchange only if he conceals key facts. And so Christ, just like the sophist, must make a bad deal appear good, must make himself appear incomparably better than all other human beings combined, and yet conceal the divinity that makes this absolute superiority possible.21
Christ’s deceptions may well have extended beyond a good disguise and entered into the realm acting. At one point during Christ’s forty days of fasting in the desert, the Devil tempts him: “If you are the Son of God, bid this stone to become bread.” Cyril, the Patriarch of Alexandria who died in 444, avoiding all talk of deception, praises the Lord’s honest response. “And therefore it was that Christ, knowing the monster’s artifice, neither made the change nor said that he was either unable or unwilling to make it, but rather shakes him off as importunate and officious, saying, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone.’ ”22 Augustine’s mentor Ambrose, by contrast, suggested the entire forty days constituted a sort of pious fraud. Christ’s apparent hunger, his weakness and thirst, were all part of a plot to convince the Devil that the fragile and sickly looking creature before him was a mere man. How else could the Devil be lured into making his fatal deal? Christ’s response to the Devil is purposefully deceptive, even if not exactly false. “The devil tempts that he may test,” Ambrose explains. “He tests that he may tempt. In contrast, the Lord deceives that he may conquer. He conquers that he may deceive. For if he had changed his nature, he would have betrayed its creator. Thus he responded neutrally, saying, ‘It is written, “That man does not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.” ’ ”23
From the Church fathers and allegorical works like the Physiologus, the narrative of Christ’s deception of the Devil, including the imagery of secretive lions and divinely baited hooks and mousetraps, passed on to later generations of the faithful. It appears in commentaries on the Apostles’ Creed that were taught in churches as well as in the widely disseminated writings of both Leo and Gregory the Great.24 Even after Anselm reconceived the entire nature of Christ’s sacrifice, rejecting the notion that Christ ransomed or purchased human freedom from a Devil who claimed right of possession over mankind, basic tenets of this narrative of divine deception survived and flourished in both popular and learned religious works. It made its way into sermon handbooks and from there into sermons themselves.25 It would even become a ubiquitous feature in both German and English Corpus Christi plays. The Chester plays, for example, which were performed throughout the fifteenth century, include a telling summary reflection concerning Christ’s victory over the Devil in the desert. Adam fell through his trespass, we are told, but Jesus withstood his tempter through grace and, as a result, Satan was “completely deceived” regarding his “godhead.”26
If medieval theologians proved a bit less enthusiastic about Christ’s various deceptions than did the playwrights, they still discussed and accepted them. For example, Thomas Aquinas interpreted the story of Christ’s desert temptations as examples for the holy to follow. Even when directly quoting from Ambrose’s decidedly fraud-friendly reading of those same events, he explicitly removed all hints that Christ had engaged in any sort of false, misleading, or deceptive behavior.27 Still, in other places, Thomas has no problem claiming that it was necessary for Christ to conceal his true identity from the demons. “For had they fully known that he was the Son of God and the effect of His passion,” Thomas writes, “they would never have procured the crucifixion of the Lord in Glory.”28
Thomas includes yet another trick played on the Devil that enjoyed wide currency in popular religious literature. Why did Jesus’s virgin mother need to marry? Thomas offers up a variety of reasons, reasons having to do with the insurmountable social and cultural challenges that an unwed mother would have faced in turn-of-the-millennium Palestine and with the need for young boys to have father figures, but he offers another one as well. Citing the church father Ignatius, Thomas argues that Joseph, Mary’s husband, was a decoy, a beard, employed so “that the manner of our Lord’s birth might be hidden from the devil.” Eventually, Thomas contends, the Devil and his minions would know full well just who and what Christ was, but during his infancy and childhood, “it behooved the malice of the devil to be withheld, lest he should persecute Him too severely: for Christ did not wish to suffer such things then, nor to make His power known, but to show himself to be in all things like other infants.”29 Early in the fifteenth century, the chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean Gerson, would support Joseph’s role in this divine plot, adding for good measure that this is how we know that Joseph, contrary to popular opinion, must have been young and
virile. Had the ancient enemy recognized in Joseph an impotent old man, he would all to easily have uncovered the true “mystery of the incarnation.”30 Many of these ideas come together in the Flemish painter Roger Campin’s famous Merode Altarpiece. Completed in the late 1420s, the triptych depicts the Annunciation, the moment when the angel announces to Mary that she will be the virgin mother of God. On the center panel, Mary, not yet aware of the angel’s presence, leans against a bench, her attention entirely given over to the religious book in her hands. On the right panel, two people, most likely the painting’s donors, stare across this scene to the left panel, where an admittedly older Joseph sits on a bench, working a piece of wood. On the table near him sits a mousetrap.31
Whether deceptive or misleading, there was no question in anyone’s mind, no doubt whatsoever, that Christ’s behavior was of a wholly different moral standing than the Devil’s deceptive and misleading behavior. The thirteenth-century Franciscan theologian Bonaventure frames this difference with great clarity. As part of his Sentences commentary, he offers four reasons why Christ’s offering on the cross was the ideal means for humanity to render satisfaction to God. First, Bonaventure explains, it was the most acceptable form of satisfaction to God because a man can offer nothing greater than his very life. Second, it was the most harmonious form of satisfaction because it undid the tangle of sins at the root of the first couple’s Fall. Just as Adam and Eve fell through pride, gluttony, and disobedience, Christ on the cross cured those sins through their contraries, through abasement, humiliation, and obedience to the divine will. Third, it was the most effective form of satisfaction because it was the best means of uplifting the human race. God asks for nothing but our love, and there is no better way of attracting the beloved than by demonstrating your own love, and so Christ willingly endured the gibbet of the cross for mankind. Finally, Bonaventure concludes, it was the most prudent form of satisfaction. “It is fitting that Christ conquered the devil with his prudence [prudentia],” he explains, “for the devil deceived the first man with his cunning [astutia].” Prudence, Bonaventure remarks, beats back pride, and then, as if exemplifying the truth of that maxim, he quotes Peter Lombard, himself harking back to Augustine: “The Redeemer arrives and the deceiver is destroyed, he stretches himself across the mousetrap of the cross, and sets out for the deceiver the food of his blood.”32 Between Christ and the Devil stands the difference between prudence and cunning.
As Bonaventure explains in his Collations on the Six Days, prudence is one of the four cardinal virtues, along with temperance, justice, and fortitude. In the Collations, Bonaventure weaves together ideas from a variety of classic authorities, both pagan and Christian, to define the nature of these virtues, and of prudence in particular. “A virtue is so called,” Bonaventure writes, drawing from Cicero’s popular definition, “because it is the strength of the mind for the performance of good and the avoidance of evil.” Doing good and avoiding evil requires that a person avoid extremes, that a person’s actions exemplify what Aristotle refers to as “the quality of intermediateness.” Bonaventure certainly does not mean that the virtuous act is perfectly situated between emotional extremes, the sort of numb emotionless center between passionate alternatives. It is the act that best fits the demands of the moment, the right balance between sweetness and severity, leniency and justice, given the particular circumstances. “Virtue,” Bonaventure adds, now borrowing from Augustine, “is nothing else than a proper measure.” The virtuous act, in other words, is measured to fit the situation, and it is prudence that makes these all-important evaluations. In this sense, prudence is an intellectual virtue rooted in a “knowledge of good and evil things and the distinctions between them.” It is dependent on memory, intelligence, and providence, refined through reflection on experience. The goal of prudence is not speculative truth but practical knowledge geared toward the present moment and its unique, singular demands. “Prudence,” Bonaventure explains, “finds this proper measure, so that you do not go too far in anything, but remain close to the center. Hence prudence is the driver of the virtues. Wherefore prudence says: I have found the proper measure; and temperance acts as a watchman and says: I too wanted this; and justice acts as a distributor, willing not only for itself, but also for the other; and because many adversities occur after that, fortitude acts as a defender, lest the proper measure be lost.”33
Craftiness or cunning, astutia, by contrast, almost always refers to inappropriate, even malicious behavior and is a constant feature in Bonaventure’s description of the fallen angels. For example, in a discussion about how demons sometimes intentionally deceive astrologers, Bonaventure observes that “so great is the craftiness of demons, that they know how to hide their fraud, making it clear that they did not err, but rather that it was the astronomer who was guilty of the error or defect in the prognostication.”34 Bonaventure’s contemporary Thomas Aquinas offers a more delineated account of craftiness. According to Aquinas, the essence of craftiness resides in the use of unfit means to achieve one’s desires. A person commits the sin of craftiness, Aquinas explains, “when, in order to obtain a certain end, whether good or evil, one uses means that are not true but fictitious and counterfeit.” The emphasis on means, not ends, is crucial. Just as prudence is an intellectual virtue concerned with properly fitting and measuring our actions to their contexts, so craftiness, the sin “opposed to prudence,” is characterized by actions that willfully disregard this proper fit and measure, actions that are false and fictitious. Ends do not absolve means, and Aquinas is very clear that craftiness is a sin even if it is directed toward a good end.35
So far so good, except Aquinas does little in this section of his Summa of Theology to offer much in the way of guidance concerning what makes some, but not all, deceptive actions false and counterfeit, nor for that matter does Bonaventure. Of course, there is the rough-and-ready, not to mention absolute and unquestionable, guidance to be found in the examples of Christ and the Devil. Christ’s actions, no matter how described, are most prudent, most fitting, and completely sinless, even if it is occasionally difficult to reconcile them with the vague standards encompassed in Aquinas’s definition of craftiness. As we have seen, while Gregory of Nyssa stressed that God’s actions manifested the perfect blend of wisdom, justice, and goodness, Ambrose often resorted to the very worrisome ends-justify-the-means style of reasoning that Aquinas would later condemn. Ambrose is more blunt than most prior or subsequent theologians, happy as he is to describe Christ’s actions as holy deceptions and pious frauds. Still, Ambrose, more often than not, invokes the same sorts of justifications for Christ’s actions that Gregory and Augustine invoke, that Bonaventure would continue to invoke centuries later. Christ’s actions are prudent, justified, and sinless because they perfectly counter the Devil’s actions: deception counters deception, fraud counters fraud and, for all that, prudence counters cunning.
Most important, most obvious, and therefore all too easy to overlook, everyone agreed that Christ’s actions needed to be understood and interpreted in the context of the biblical stories themselves, in the context of the grand outline of human history beginning with the Fall and culminating in the Christ’s resurrection from the dead and ascension into heaven. Christ’s actions were most prudent and just because they achieved their ends in the most fitting and appropriate manner possible. Given the specific circumstances of mankind’s first transgression and the unique problems to which it gave rise—and this holds whether Christ’s work was understood as a form of purchasing man from the Devil or as atonement to an offended God—certain sorts of potentially and sometimes intentionally misleading actions, disguises, and statements were acceptable, even necessary, and never less than good. Implicit in this approach to Christ’s work is the idea that quite similar types of actions or behavior can, in different circumstances, take on very different moral qualities. Satan, when he disguises himself as a serpent to deceive Eve, commits an act of guile and craftiness, but when Christ disguise
s himself as a mere man to deceive Satan, he acts with justice and prudence. William Langland, the fourteenth-century author of Piers Plowman, sums up this idea nicely when he writes, “And just as man was beguiled by the guiler’s guile, so shall grace from which all began finally succeed and beguile the guiler, and that’s a good trick, Art to deceive art.”36
The idea that circumstances could define or even make the sin was a truism of pastoral literature. Writing in the twelfth century, Alan of Lille notes that the gravity of a sin often depends on its origins and causes. “He sins more gravely,” Alan notes, “who is seduced by the smell of lucre or sweet caresses, than if he is deceived through drunkenness.”37 Thomas Chobham concurred in his influential early thirteenth-century penitential treatise, the Summa confessorum, in which he offers detailed analyses of how the circumstances surrounding and defining our actions can transform venial sins into mortal sins. Who committed the sin? When and where did the sinner commit it, and for what reasons? As Chobham puts it, “a person sins less who steals in order to feed his father, than he who steals so that he may live lavishly.”38 Sometimes circumstances could determine whether an action was sinful at all. The fourteenth-century Spanish curate Guido of Monte Rocherii explains that a sin can be mortal in two ways, because the deed itself is sinful (and here he cites fornication) or because of the intention governing the deed. “To sing in church,” he offers by way of an entirely noncontroversial example, “is not a mortal sin, indeed it can be meritorious. But to sing in church in order to please a woman and entice her to sin is a mortal sin.”39
Just as the circumstances define our actions, so it seems, they define God’s actions, and from the earliest Christian centuries until at least the fifteenth century a great many people believed God could deceive, could commit fraud, perhaps could lie. Theologians who in some places loudly proclaim that God’s perfection makes it impossible for him to be a deceiver, in other places praise God’s deceptions. Theologians who claim God merely allows or permits evil actions to occur, who argue that God never directly deceives, invoke gripping and memorable metaphors in honor of Christ’s duping the Devil. Admittedly, the circumstances demanded this response and, given those circumstances, theologians contended that God’s actions were prudent, fair, and perfectly in keeping with the nature of an all-powerful being. Extreme situations, after all, call for extreme measures. Jacobus de Voragine, the Dominican author of one the most popular religious works of the entire Middle Ages, The Golden Legend, makes this abundantly clear in his description of Christ’s passion. In words not so different from those Bonaventure had used in his Sentences commentary, and invoking the language of debts, fishhooks, and mousetraps, Jacobus describes how “our redemption was best adapted to accomplish the defeat of man’s enemy.” The timing of Christ’s actions, their place, and their nature were all perfectly suited to their goal, to the circumstances.40
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