The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment
Page 13
Bayle takes all this for granted. As they did with everything they touched, he argues, Scholastic theologians made a mess of scripture, needlessly complicating its simple and self-evident clarity. Bayle hasn’t the slightest doubt that every biblical story in which God deceives includes the keys for its own translation into a properly philosophical idiom through which God’s individual interventions in the world disappear into the orderly system of creation itself. Never mind centuries of exegetical labor that found it impossible to deny God’s deceptions. Never mind all those fourteenth-century theologians fascinated with God’s absolute and incomprehensible power, his ability to do all possible things. Bayle, following Malebranche following Descartes, accepts a God “who does not disturb the simplicity and uniformity of his ways in order to avoid a particular disaster.”108 All of this Bayle asserts in the name of a metaphysical conception of God, a God without human attributes, without emotion. Never mind, finally, that this is an impossible dream and any human conception of God will conceive of God in human terms. Bayle inherited Descartes’s greatest success, convincing God to give up rhetoric in exchange for the dreams of the philosophers, and the philosophers, evidently, dreamt of a curiously compromised world. A world in which paradise would no longer be found in the memories of Eden, a garden without trouble or illness, but in the ruin once thought to have been the result of the Devil’s lie, the ruin of a fallen world now oozing with disease, requiring our endless toil. For the philosophers, the Devil, like God, never had to say anything, because God had always already listened to him and learned.
CHAPTER THREE
Human Beings
EVERY LIE IS A SIN
Over twelve hundred years of theological debate on deception ended in parody and vitriol. While the parody preceded, English readers encountered the vitriol first.
In the preface to his 1657 translation of Blaise Pascal’s satirical dismantling of post-Reformation Catholic ethical thought, The Provincial Letters, Henry Hammond, a widely respected royalist and Anglican cleric, could find nothing but insidious and dangerous scheming in “the mystery of Jesuitisme.” The Jesuits, Hammond contends, seek “to grasp all the world to themselves, and to usurp an universal empire over men’s consciences.” Rejecting God’s precepts and rules, they endeavor to win people over with a laxity that transforms sin into virtue. Unlike the first Christians, who willingly suffered persecution and calamity, never acquiescing to the false demands of the world, the Jesuits dispense “with all the obligations of evangelical purity” and treat every ethical rule “like a wax nose capable of all forms” as they “level the precepts of the gospel to the passions of men [and] make our tendency to future Beatitude consistent with the pleasures and enjoyment of this world.” In a final burst of outrage, Hammond writes, “Such societies of men are Academies of dissimulation and sycophancy, diabolically embarked in a design, of not only practicing, but maintaining and justifying whatever is most horrid and abominable in the sight of God and man.”1
Hammond’s preface and Pascal’s work notwithstanding, every Catholic theologian, Jesuit or otherwise, believed lying was a sin. To have claimed otherwise would have been to contradict centuries of accumulated argument and authority beginning with the towering figure of Augustine, whose rejection of lies could hardly have been clearer. Every lie is a sin, the great bishop had argued, and every sin must be avoided. No hoped-for benefit, no amount of good to be achieved or evil to be prevented, can justify our lies. Augustine was adamant about this and believed the Bible itself supported his confidence. Near the very beginning of Against Lying, a treatise composed in 420, Augustine approvingly quotes from Paul’s letter to the Romans: “Thou hatest all the workers of iniquity; thou wilt destroy all that speak a lie.” There is no room for misinterpretation here, Augustine contends, no suggestion that God looks favorably on certain lies, unfavorably on others. The apostle “has brought forth a universal proposition, saying, ‘Thou wilt destroy all that speak a lie.’ ”2 To think anything different is to run up against irrefutable authority, insurmountable ethical problems, irresolvable contradiction and paradox. No good can come from evil, and no virtue can come from vice.
Augustine wrote Against Lies in response to questions he had received from an ascetic named Consentius, who had taken an active role in combating a Spanish heretical group that had formed in the late fourth century around the teachings of Priscillian. Doctrinal errors aside, the Priscillianists had proven difficult to uproot because they found it perfectly acceptable to lie in order to protect and conceal their true beliefs. When questioned, Consentius explains, they happily shield themselves behind claims of an orthodox faith that they in no way accept. Consentius’s solution to such mendacity was simple—for the good of the Catholic Church, we must lie to the liars, we must pretend to be the very heretics we are trying to root out, for “in no other way can we discover the hidden wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing, secretly and seriously preying upon the flock of the Lord.”3 Augustine would have none of Consentius’s tit-for-tat ethical reasoning, and Against Lying reads as a wholesale assault on dishonesty, dissimulation, and lies, not just in cases concerning the faith and the fight against heresy, but in every case, no matter what the circumstances, no matter what the repercussions.
Augustine understood how harsh his prohibition might seem to others. He understood the grief it might cause. Imagine unjust persecutors come pounding at your door seeking the location of an acquaintance, a friend you have hidden away under the floorboards, in a back room, or across town. Or perhaps you are a doctor tending a critically ill patient whose feeble system can no longer tolerate any tumult, neither trauma nor tragedy. “How is my son?” he asks, and you think about the news you just received concerning the boy’s death from the same accident that has left his father in such fragile shape. These may well be the sort of overbaked cases that philosophers love, but they trouble Augustine, and he writes movingly about them. “Because we are men and live among men,” he writes, “I confess that I am not yet in the number of those who are not troubled by compensatory sins. Often, in human affairs, human sympathy overcomes me and I am unable to resist” lying. Think what will happen if you choose to speak the truth in these cases. Your friend will suffer a horrible death at the hands of his enemies, or the patient will die from shock and sorrow even as people accuse you “of loving homicide as truth.”4 All this might be true, Augustine admits, but such considerations are irrelevant before God, who is the final arbiter of our virtue and of our salvation, and it is God himself who has declared every lie to be a sin and demanded that every sin must be avoided.
Not everyone agreed with Augustine, but their disagreements had little traction. Augustine’s contemporary Jerome, famous for his Latin translation of scripture, believed the Bible did in fact authorize the use of dissimulation and deception to help secure the salvation of nonbelievers. Hadn’t Paul supported such beneficial trickery when he wrote to the Corinthians, “To the Jews I became a Jew so as to win the Jews”?5 And, in a nod to the enduring tradition of the Devil’s mousetrap, Jerome notes that Jesus himself practiced dissimulation when he hid his divinity within human flesh. Despite his own fondness for the mousetrap, Augustine rejected Jerome’s arguments in a series of forceful and uncompromising letters and, with few (and entirely inconsequential) exceptions, the subsequent theological tradition sided with Augustine, whose absolute prohibition against lies quickly became something of a commonplace.6 The sixth-century Spanish bishop and encyclopedist Isidore of Seville concurred with him, as did Gregory the Great. In the twelfth century, Peter Lombard made Augustine’s prohibition the centerpiece of his own analysis of lying, which itself was part of his more general analysis of the Ten Commandments in the third book of his Sentences.7 After Peter, no aspiring theologian, from the Franciscan Alexander of Hales in the early thirteenth century to the Dominicans Gabriel Biel and Antoninus of Florence in the fifteenth century, not mention such influential sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers as Domingo
de Soto, Thomas Cajetan, Juan Azor, and Francisco Suarez, failed to rehearse and endorse Augustine’s opinion that every lie is a sin. Given the near-universal assent that theologians gave to Augustine’s prohibition, it is not at all surprising that when, in the early seventeenth century, the Englishman John Downame took up the cause in his aptly named essay, A Treatise Against Lying, he happily relied again and again on Augustine’s enduring treatise Against Lies.8
Yet despite almost unanimous acceptance of Augustine’s prohibition, the Catholic theological discussion about lies and deception outraged Henry Hammond and proved ripe for Pascal’s satire. Perhaps Jesuit theologians condemned all lies as sinful, but they had accomplished this (so their critics would argue) through verbal tricks, tendentious redefinitions, and willful obfuscation. As evidence of their mendacity, Hammond cites the Jesuit support of such suspect techniques of subterfuge as “Equivocation, mental restrictions [and] shifting and direction of the Intention.”9 Pascal would consider all these techniques in the ninth of his Provincial Letters. Written under the guise of the country gentleman Louis de Montalte, Pascal’s letters purport to record a series of discussions with an enthusiastic Jesuit all too convinced of the brilliance of his order’s novel moral teachings. The ninth letter takes up the theme of alleged Jesuit laxity as Montalte’s interlocutor runs through some of the “very easy, very sure and quite numerous” means the Jesuits employ to secure their salvation.10 Having discoursed on a variety of topics, including how to eat well during fasts and the virtues of self-centered complacency, he turns to some of the “methods we have developed in order to avoid sin in worldly conversation and intrigues.” How, for example, can a good Christian avoid lying in situations where telling the truth might be inconvenient? There is, of course, the tried-and-true method of equivocation, the use of ambiguous words that we know our listeners will understand one way, but which we understand differently. Useful as it is, this method has its limits because sometimes there are no equivocal words appropriate to the situation. In such cases, the Jesuits offer the strategy of mental reservation. Pascal’s interlocutor explains, quoting from the writings of the late sixteenth-century Jesuit theologian Thomas Sanchez: “A man can swear that he did not do something, even if he really did it, understanding to himself that he did not do it on a certain day, or before he was born, or under similar conditions, without his actual words having any indication that this is what he means.”11
Shocked, Montalte interjects that this practice sounds like little more than sheer lying and perjury. The Jesuit disagrees. It is intention, he explains, that determines the moral quality of our actions, and if we intend our spoken words to mean something different than our listeners will take them to mean, so much the worse for them. When we employ the technique of mental reservation, we intend that our spoken words (false when considered on their own) are part of a larger statement, a statement made true by the addition of those unheard words. Of course, this complex balancing act between public statement and careful qualifying thought can be difficult to achieve and, perhaps, may even be beyond the ability of most people. The Jesuit admits this and happily announces that his order has even found a way for less talented people to make use of the technique of mental reservation. The less able can confidently go ahead and assert that they have not done things they have done so long as they silently include “the general intention to give their words the sense that a capable man would have given them.” Enthralled with his order’s ingenuity, the Jesuit asks, “Be candid now and confess, if you have not often felt yourself embarrassed, in consequence of not knowing this?” Montalte can do little else but respond, “Sometimes.”12
Vitriol is one thing, analysis another, and parody, however effective, is not the same as argument. While Pascal’s Letters would forever tarnish the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholic theological discourse concerning truth-telling and lies, they did so at the expense of ignoring the internal tensions that had fueled that discourse and the external forces that had shaped it. Augustine had declared every lie a sin, and the theologians followed suit, only to discover the suit did not fit as well they had hoped or needed. Caught between the demands of theology and the challenges of the world, theologians sought a middle ground, both wholly Catholic and wholly useful, recognizing both the absolute demands of faith and the vagaries of life in a fallen and maddeningly complex world. For Pascal, the very desire to accommodate marked the essence of our spiritual misery, a misery so deep that, in the end, even he could not entirely escape it.
EVERY SIN IS A LIE
In Against Lying, his letter to Consentius, Augustine repeatedly invokes consequentialist arguments in favor of his prohibition against lying. Consentius must not lie to uncover deceitful heretics, because lies never achieve the good ends we intend. If we lie to people who already lie to hide their faith, aren’t we teaching them that lies are acceptable and, in the long run, making it that much harder to identify and convert them? If they believe our lies, won’t we only confirm them in their heresy? If they discover we are lying, why should they ever trust anything we say? Our lies can only backfire on us.13 No doubt Augustine took these arguments seriously, but the real basis for his prohibition against lies had little to with outcomes and everything to do with our relationship to God, to the Word, and to the Word made flesh in the incarnation of Christ.
Both stoic ideas and scripture shaped Augustine’s philosophy and theology of the Word and of language. From the Stoics, Augustine drew on and then modified a distinction between words and meaning.14 In one of his sermons on the Gospel of John, for example, Augustine asks his audience to look within themselves, to observe their own hearts, and to watch how language works. Augustine’s reliance on visual metaphors is intentional. Before we speak, Augustine suggests, we have a thought, something we wish to express, an inner word or concept already present in our heart and “waiting to be uttered.” This inner word is immaterial, preexists all languages, and is something we discover already within us when we look within ourselves using the eyes of our heart. Vision requires light, and just as the sun makes things in the world visible to us, so God illuminates these hidden contents of our mind, Augustine argues, which are “confined by no language” but make all language possible. The inner word is neither Latin nor Greek, but if we are Roman, we will express it in Latin and, if we are Greek, we will express it in Greek. Nor should we confuse this inner word with the silent thoughts or hymns that “run through our mind.” When we quietly think things to ourselves, we use the same language that we use to express ourselves to others, a language that exists and changes over time. The inner word, by contrast, is the unchanging truth, the concept, the idea that we seek to express whenever we speak. Words, in effect, are “significant sounds” whose meaning derives from and depends on the truth of the inner word made known to us through divine illumination.15
For Augustine, the dependence of language on the inner word shapes the ethical demands of all discourse. If verbal signs signify mental concepts, then, Augustine reasons, they exist for the sake of correctly expressing our inner states and ideas to others. “There is no reason for us to signify something,” Augustine writes in On Christian Doctrine, “that is, to give a sign, except to express and transmit to another’s mind what is in the mind of the person who gives the sign.”16 While Augustine believed the subordination of language to inner word indicated that our spoken words be truthful, it was scripture that transformed this linguistic insight into a criterion of moral and spiritual rightness. In the Gospel of John, the evangelist describes the entire history of salvation as a series of speech acts. “In the beginning was the Word,” the evangelist proclaims in the opening lines of his gospel, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John the Baptist, “a man sent from God,” testifies to the coming of “the true light” and, in good order, that true light appears when “the Word became flesh and lived among us … as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”17 Augustine asserts that the movemen
t from God to Word and from Word to Word made flesh both clarified and was clarified by the structure of human language, which moves from illuminated inner word to language. “The Father,” Augustine explains, “as though uttering Himself, begot the Word, equal in all things to Himself. For He would not have uttered Himself completely and perfectly, if there were anything less or more in His Word than Himself…. And therefore this Word is truly Truth, since whatever is in that knowledge from which it was born is also in the Word.”18 The Father’s speech begets the Word, Augustine contends, and the Word’s own speech produces the incarnation. “For just as our word in some way becomes bodily sound by assuming that in which it may be manifested to the senses of men,” he writes, “so the Word of God was made flesh by assuming that in which he might also be manifested to the sight of men.”19