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

by Dallas G. Denery II

  Bayle makes these claims in the Dictionary’s entry for “Gregory (of Rimini),” in which he casts Rimini, an Augustinian canon who lectured at length on Peter Lombard’s Sentences during the 1340s, in the role of the villainous proponent of the thesis that God can lie and, therefore, as Descartes’s intellectual antagonist. Bayle, sadly, is simply wrong about Rimini, though perhaps his confusion here is excusable. He draws his information concerning Rimini from Marin Mersenne, the Jesuit-educated Minim friar and Descartes’s closest correspondent. In the “Second Set of Objections and Replies” to Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, Mersenne raises a possible objection to Descartes’s claim that “God cannot lie or deceive.” Mersenne writes, “There are schoolmen who say he can. Gabriel, for example, and Arimenensis, among others, think that in the absolute sense God does lie, that is, communicate to men things which are opposed to his intentions and decrees.”85 While no one, except perhaps Luther in his most desperate moments, had asserted that God could lie, there was no shortage of Scholastic and Reformation theologians who believed God could deceive. Neither Gabriel Biel nor Gregory of Rimini should be numbered among their ranks. As Rimini would put it, “God cannot say something false to someone, willing that the person to whom he speaks will assent to the falsehood.”86

  Without raising any of the concerns about divine omnipotence that compelled medieval thinkers to ponder the possibility of a deceiving God, Mersenne (and Bayle, for the most part, is happy to quote Mersenne almost verbatim) briefly confronts Descartes with two instances of apparent scriptural divine dishonesty. The Lord sends Jonah to proclaim Nineveh’s allegedly imminent destruction, and he hardens Pharaoh’s heart against Moses’s divine message. “Cannot God,” Mersenne then concludes, “treat men as a doctor treats the sick, or a father his children? In both these cases there is frequent deception though it is always employed beneficially and with wisdom. For if God were to show us the pure truth, what eye, what mental vision, could endure it?”87

  Descartes’s initial response to these objections willfully misinterprets the entire theological tradition in support of his own philosophical agenda. “In saying that God does not lie, and is not a deceiver,” Descartes argues, “I think I am in agreement with all metaphysicians and theologians past and future.” This is simply not true concerning the past, and as for future metaphysicians and theologians, Descartes could only surmise (although events may well have proven him right). With this blanket denial of divine deception in hand, Descartes contends that Mersenne’s two biblical anecdotes are not examples of deception at all. He finesses his way around Jonah’s false prophecy as so many had before him by claiming that God’s pronouncement was conditional. He would destroy Nineveh if its inhabitants failed to mend their ways. They did, so he didn’t. As for Pharaoh, God “merely hardened Pharaoh’s heart in a negative sense, by not bestowing on him the grace which would have brought about his change of heart.” On this reading, Pharaoh was simply allowed to be Pharaoh, and devastation for the Egyptians ensued. In neither case could God be accused of nefarious action.88

  Surprisingly, and this no doubt is the initial source of Bayle’s dissatisfaction, Descartes then adds “that through the mouths of the prophets God can produce verbal untruths.” God’s deceptions in these cases, “like the lies of doctors who deceive patients in order to cure them, are free of any malicious intent to deceive.”89 And so it may well appear that confident assertions of divine veracity to the contrary, Descartes trails along in lockstep after a tradition that moves through most all the great theologians, from Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine to Bonaventure and Aquinas, to Luther and Calvin, proclaiming in unison with them that God is no deceiver, except when he is, and when he is, his deceptions are never malicious, always beneficial, never inordinate, always fitting and always just. Most likely this is true so far as it goes, only it does not go all that far, as Descartes makes clear in his replies to the “Sixth Set of Objections,” when he finds himself confronted with yet another selection of biblical passages. Although he agrees to respond to them so that no one thinks they somehow offer proof against his philosophy, Descartes clearly considers the endeavor a bit of a sidetrack. He claims never to have been involved in theological studies “except insofar as they have contributed to [his] private instruction,” and that he has never felt much of “a vocation for such sacred studies.” He concludes this preamble with a resolution that, in its brevity, implicitly asserts the general irrelevance of biblical narrative for the sort of metaphysics he hopes to establish. “So I hereby declare,” he writes, “that in the future I will refuse to comment on questions of this kind.”90

  Descartes had already indicated this attitude toward scripture in his dedicatory letter to the theologians at the Sorbonne, appended to the beginning of the Meditations. Descartes informs “those most learned and distinguished men, the Dean and Doctors of the sacred Faculty of Theology,” that he has “always thought that two topics—namely God and the soul—are prime examples of subjects where demonstrative proofs ought to be given with the aid of philosophy rather than theology.” As believers, Descartes notes, it is enough to accept the doctrines of religion and the veracity of holy scripture on faith, but this will do nothing to convince nonbelievers. Only proofs from natural reason will convince them of these most important truths on which all hope and good morals rest. Scripture itself, he adds, supports this entirely nonscriptural philosophical endeavor. There are numerous passages in the Bible indicating that “knowledge of God is easier to acquire than the knowledge we have of many created things.” In his letter to the Romans, for example, Paul writes “that which is known of God is manifest in them,” which suggests “that everything that may be known of God can be demonstrated by reasoning which has no other source but our own mind.” Descartes sets this challenge for himself in the Meditations and promises the members of the Sorbonne that he will demonstrate how God may be “more certainly known than the things of this world.”91

  Descartes’s approach to the question of divine deception exploits this distinction between biblical revelation and natural reason. Claiming that God can deceive, Descartes argues, is no different from claiming that God experiences anger or any other human emotion. While the Bible certainly describes God as if he has emotions, Descartes claims, like Calvin, that we must not interpret such expressions literally. Calvin, despite his own warnings against anthropomorphizing God, could never really relinquish such language, sanctioned as it was so clearly and forcefully in scripture. Descartes, by contrast, endeavors to break scripture’s hold over our conception of God. Descartes notes that there are two ways of talking about and describing God. The first way “is appropriate for ordinary understanding” and, while it “contains some truth,” its truth is “relative to human beings.” This way of speaking is common in the Bible. “The second way of speaking,” he continues, “comes closer to expressing the naked truth—which truth is not relative to human beings, it is this way of speaking that everyone ought to use when philosophizing.” Descartes utilizes this nonscriptural approach in the Meditations. In fact, this approach is methodologically necessary. In these investigations, he does not consider himself as one person among others, a mind embodied. Rather, he considers himself as if in isolation and “solely as mind.” The very application of this method undercuts the possibility of thinking about God in human terms precisely because it puts in question everything we naturally assume about human nature, and this applies to any normal conception of deception.92 “It is very clear from this that my remarks in the Meditations were concerned not with the verbal expression of lies,” Descartes explains to Mersenne, “but only with malice in the formal sense, the internal malice which is involved in deception.”93

  Bayle runs out of patience at this point with Descartes’s attempts to distinguish between beneficial and malicious deceptions. So far as he can make out, Descartes has done nothing but entangle himself in the very net he is trying to escape as he seemingly reaffirms the contra
diction that God is a nondeceiving deceiver. “When a man is forced to confess that a general maxim,” Bayle explains, “which he had lain down as the foundation of a certain and demonstrative doctrine, admits many exceptions, he shakes it to that degree, that it can no longer fix our uncertainties.” Once we allow for any divine deception, we open the floodgates to more. A skeptic, Bayle adds, can now argue that our most certain intuitions of things are nothing more than beneficially arranged deceptions. Bayle offers a tellingly implausible biographical explanation for Descartes’s backslide. The last thing Descartes expected, Bayle writes, was for theologians to use passages from scripture against him to defend the existence of a lying God, “and yet the storm fell upon him from that very quarter; and it was so violent he was forced to yield.”94

  The pity of it all, Bayle believes, is that Descartes creates these problems for himself. Having correctly distinguished philosophical from nonphilosophical ways of talking about God, he fails to insist on that distinction. The Bible includes countless stories in which God changes his mind, expresses ignorance, or promises to reward or punish individuals, all of which, Bayle assures his readers, “are incompatible with supreme perfection.”95 Whatever else has happened when the Bible implicates God in deception, we can rest assured that God did nothing of the sort. Scripture, so the saying goes, speaks the language of man, and Bayle is less restrained than Descartes in summarizing this principle: “Vulgar minds being not able to raise themselves to the most perfect being, it was necessary that the prophets should bring God down to man, and make him stammer with us, as a nurse stammers with a child whom she suckles.” When we discuss God as he is, we must discuss him in the proper metaphysical terms. In support of this position, Bayle borrows a programmatic statement from the late seventeenth-century thinker Pierre Sylvain Régis’s System of Philosophy. “When I wish to speak about God with precision,” Régis writes, “I must neither consult myself, nor use ordinary language. Rather, I must raise myself in spirit above every created thing in order to investigate the vast and immense idea of an infinitely perfect being.” Perhaps in a moral treatise one might describe God in emotional terms, Régis concludes, “but this is in no way acceptable in a purely metaphysical treatise in which precise language is required.”96

  Régis states nothing that Descartes had not already asserted, and Bayle’s effort to employ Descartes’s own ideas against their author results in a rather uncharitable, even incorrect, interpretation of Descartes’s account of divine deception. Descartes himself is in part to blame here with his imprecise references to “deception.” Imprecision, however, like our vulgar way of talking about God, is a relative thing, and Bayle’s dissatisfaction with Descartes’s handling of scripture owes more to the latter’s success in prying the language of metaphysics free from scripture than Bayle recognizes. Bayle, as well as Régis (who, it is worth noting, never worries about divine deception at any point in the metaphysical section of his System), simply take for granted what Descartes still needs to accomplish. This becomes evident when, after distinguishing between malicious and beneficial deceptions, Descartes raises what he considers to be a more “important point.” Putting aside the Bible, he considers an apparent case of divine deception drawn from the natural world. “From time to time,” Descartes writes, “it does appear that we really are deceived by the natural instinct that God gave us, as in the case of the thirst felt by those who suffer from dropsy. These patients have a positive impulse to drink which derives from the nature God has bestowed on the body in order to preserve it; yet this nature does deceive them because on this occasion the drink will have a harmful effect.”97 Descartes assures his readers that this example does nothing to impugn God’s veracity and goodness, but it certainly might seem otherwise to the suffering individual.

  Relative to the sufferer, it appears that God deceives him or, at the very least, constructed him to be deceived. Descartes contends that this is entirely the wrong way to approach the problem. To interpret the sufferer’s thirst in this manner is to interpret it from a purely human or “vulgar” (as Bayle would have it) perspective and is no different from assuming scripture offers a literal account of God’s emotional state when it describes him as angry or vindictive. Worse, it assumes God intends to deceive this person, in this way, at this moment. By contrast, if we consider the problem philosophically, that is, if we consider it from God’s perspective, any hint of deception and malice vanishes. At first this may not seem to be a very promising approach. In the Principles of Philosophy, Descartes argues that nothing happens without God’s willing it to happen. “We perceive in [God],” Descartes writes, “a power so immeasurable that we regard it as impious to suppose that we could ever do anything which was not already preordained by him.”98 And so it may well seem that the philosophical perspective reveals a God who predestines every evil in the world, every illness and ounce of human suffering. How could God be anything but malicious and our deceptions intended?

  Descartes rejects this way of framing the problem and cautions his readers against inquiring into God’s intentions. Finite beings like us can have no truck with the infinite, and we “should not be so arrogant as to suppose that we can share in God’s plans,” he writes in the Principles, adding, “We should instead consider him as the efficient cause of all things; and starting from the divine attributes which by God’s will we have some knowledge of … see … what conclusions should be drawn concerning those effects which are apparent to our senses.”99 We must not, in other words, ask why God made the world. Rather, we must ask how he made it given the kind of being he is. What kind of being is God? Descartes believes, as did everyone who preceded him, that God is perfect and all-powerful. Perfection entails immutability because if change were possible it would imply an absence and future fulfillment of goodness not yet possessed. In God, all perfection is fully realized in the simple unity of his unchanging being. God’s will, therefore, is also immutable, constant, even as it simultaneously predestines and sustains everything that occurs and exists. Deception is utterly incompatible with such a being because “in every case of deception some imperfection is to be found.”100

  Theologians from Augustine to Calvin had sought to explain how deception could be made consistent with God’s nature. Descartes reframes the problem and asks, How can God will all things in such a way that he does not deceive and yet, from our perspective, it appears that he does? Descartes begins at the beginning, drawing out the creative implications of God’s nature and essence. As efficient cause, God is the creator of the universe, the “general” source of all motion and energy within it. His constancy and immutability guarantee that he sustains this universe as it was created, preserving always “the same quantity of motion in matter.”101 God is infinitely wise and good, so we know his laws structure the universe in as benevolent a manner as possible. Put differently, the universe is a collection of matter in motion, organized through a minimal set of constant and unchanging laws designed to establish the best possible and most beneficial system in which beings like ourselves, souls embodied, can exist and thrive.102 Given God’s nature, we can rest assured that the established relation between body and soul, like the universe as whole, will also be most beneficially, intelligently, and wisely arranged. Our understanding is undeniably limited, but even here we have no right to complain that the role God assigns us “is not the principle one or the most perfect of all.” God is no deceiver, and he has given us the ability to avoid error and secure certainty. While God could have made us impervious to deception, we must assume that he has his reasons for constructing us the way he did. “I cannot deny,” Descartes writes, “that there may in some way be more perfection in the universe as a whole because some of its parts are not immune from error, while others are immune, than there would be if all the parts were exactly alike.”103

  Even in such a divinely orchestrated and law-governed world—take the case of dropsy—it may well seem that these laws intentionally deceives us. Again, Descart
es warns, this is to consider God’s work relative to human interests. We cannot pretend to understand God’s intentions, nor can we pretend to understand our place in creation. We can, however, count on God’s constancy and goodness. He is not malicious in his designs. In the case of dropsy, Descartes explains, the false sense of thirst is the unavoidable consequence of a human body created in the best possible fashion given the structures of this creation. “It is much better,” Descartes writes, “that it should mislead on this occasion than it should always mislead when the body is in good health.”104 In his 1680 Treaty on Nature and Grace, the French Oratorian priest Nicholas Malebranche offers a decidedly Cartesian elaboration on the relation between general laws and individual suffering. “These laws, on account of their simplicity, necessarily have unhappy consequences for us,” he explains, “but these consequences do not warrant that God change these laws into more composite ones. For his laws have a greater proportion of wisdom and fecundity to the work they produce than all others which he could establish for the same design.” Perhaps God could avoid “unhappy consequences” through “an infinite number of specific volitions,” Malebranche notes, “but his Wisdom which he loves more than his work, and the immutable and necessary order which is the rule of his volitions do not permit this.”105 God’s immutability checks random alterations within the order of a creation whose “unhappy consequences” can be discovered, even rectified, through attention to his unchanging laws.

  God loses the ability to deceive as soon as he loses the ability to speak, and he loses the ability to speak as soon as he prefers the system to its moments.106 To imagine a God that speaks is to imagine God in human terms, a God who cares about individuals, who laughs, forgives, and punishes, who is invested and involved in the moment. The theological tradition could never escape this conception of God, because God had revealed himself through a historical narrative of exceptional and singular events—in the story of the Fall and our ever-lengthening exile from paradise, through the lying mouths of prophets, in the disguised incarnation of his only son, and in Satan’s endless stratagems. These revelations of purposefully deceptive divine interactions with men needed to be rationalized with God’s goodness, even if only through forever vague allusions to God’s incomprehensible wisdom. For every satanic sophistry, God responds as the perfect and nobly upright orator, undoing cruel cunning with perfect prudence. Descartes’s philosophical redescription of God can allow for this narrative only as the dangerous exception to the rule. Divine revelation, Descartes admits, guarantees that there will be “some changes” to the immutable order of things, certain events inconsistent with the universe’s general laws and rules. Concerned he has granted too much, he then immediately qualifies and limits these supernatural intrusions into a divinely instituted order, “but apart from these we should not suppose that any other changes occur in God’s works, in case this suggests some inconstancy in God.”107