The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment
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Later Thomists, such as the early sixteenth-century Italian cardinal Thomas Cajetan, would radicalize the split between truths and Truth, introducing the notion of “pure nature” into Thomas’s thought. Natural things, even human beings, have natural ends wholly distinct from their supernatural ends in God. In the state of pure nature, they argued, human beings can only desire natural ends, and it is philosophy that reveals these independent and self-sufficient natural ends.69 While these distinctions are foreign to Thomas, they are latent in his division between truths and Truth, and that division (or variations on it) supports the Scholastic contention that not every lie is a lie against the first and uncreated truth. Some lies are about things in this world, created things—the good of the state, the whereabouts of an innocent fugitive—and these lies can be weighed and evaluated, judged to be mortal or merely venial. No longer immediately defined as an offense against the infinite God and the infinite good of salvation, the culpability of these lies depends on context and the liar’s intention to help or to harm. Scotus would push this line of thought far enough to speculate on the possible theological merit of our lies, but even he never denied, in the end, that every lie is a sin. Albert is no different, undercutting the implications of his division between the theological and the civil and concluding that no temporal benefit can outweigh the harm the soul suffers when we lie. Thomas’s discussion of truth mirrors these various analyses of deception. Having located a place for the philosophical examination of the world, he limits it. The desire for knowledge becomes mere curiosity and blameworthy unless it is ultimately referred to God, divine truth, divine mandate, and our final ends.70
INSTITUTIONAL TRANSFORMATIONS
Thomas may have argued that the theologian considers things only as they relate to God, but the practical demands of his position required he consider quite a few other things as well. These considerations did much to shape the Scholastic discourse concerning deception. This becomes clear if we return to Anselm, whose work everywhere reflects its origins in the daily life of the monastery, in which every activity and every duty was always already understood (at least ideally) as an act of devotion to God, and this applied no less to studying, teaching, or working in the kitchen than it did to reciting the Psalter or attending mass. Anselm describes one of his works, The Monologion, as a meditation. For a monk, “to meditate” did not mean simply to reflect on and analyze an idea. It also had practical and moral connotations that encompassed more than just study. Meditation was a physical and spiritual activity involving the intelligence, the heart, and the tongue. The word meditation also named the first moment of contemplative prayer, the moment when the monk strove to conform himself to the text, to embody the prayer.71 Anselm explicitly joins together all these senses of meditation at the conclusion of the Proslogion, when he writes, “Meanwhile let my mind meditate upon it; let my tongue speak of it. Let my heart love it; let my mouth talk of it. Let my soul hunger for it; let my flesh thirst for it; let my whole being desire it, until I enter into your joy, Lord, who are ever the three and the one God, blessed forever and ever. Amen.” The Proslogion is both a speculative treatise and a prayer. Indeed, its speculative or philosophical aspects must not be disentangled from its overall setting as a prayer. It is a prayer even when it is speculative, and the act of speculation is the performance of a duty to pray, an act of piety and devotion, the repayment of a debt to God.72
The monastic setting not only lends form to Anselm’s writings (the dialogue, the prayer, the meditation) but even shapes their content. Since speculation is prayer, it always assumes the perspective of the monk’s immediate relation to God. No other perspective ought to matter to the monk, whose life signifies truly and rightly only when it signifies its love of God. But this singleness of perspective is exactly what Thomas finds mistaken in Anselm’s theory of truth. Anselm, to hear Thomas tell it, lacks that perspective which contemplates the truth of created things independently of God and the first truth. If the institutional setting of the monastery itself organizes and shapes Anselm’s conception of truth, the university plays no less a role in shaping Scholastic conceptions of truth. Even though early governing statutes for the university at Paris borrowed from monastic ideals concerning the relation between virtue and study, the university would never have been mistaken for a monastery.73 Much of this had to do with the sheer size of the university and its charge to educate not only theologians but also future bureaucrats, arts masters, doctors, and lawyers. To accomplish this most effectively, standards needed to be set, pedagogy unified, and the various fields of study organized. This applied to the teaching of grammar and dialectic as much as it did to theology which, in the twelfth century, began to be treated as an academic discipline for the first time. Under these pressures, theology became a field of study, a body of knowledge to be mastered, and great effort was undertaken to create texts in systematic theology capable of “meeting the needs of professional theological education.”74
Thomas explicitly refers to these new educational demands in the prologue to the Summa, where he explains that his goal is to organize coherently and concisely all of theological science for the beginning student. In the context of the university, theology, indeed all fields of study, became bodies of knowledge to be learned and debated, mastered, refined, and extended. There is even linguistic evidence for this new conception of study. Over the course of the twelfth century, the term “speculation” (speculatio), which for monks like Anselm had implied a devotional exercise related to contemplation (contemplatio), came to refer to a teachable activity of the mind independent of religious emotion.75 It is at precisely this point that the institutional structure of the university appears to guide the content of Thomas’s thought. Once speculation is freed from devotion and conceived as an activity detachable from prayer, it becomes possible to study things in themselves and not solely as they stand in relation to God, and so it becomes possible to consider the truths and lies of this world as they relate to the things of this world. Even the division of the university into different faculties, each with its own area of expertise and texts, set the stage for this reconceptualization of truth and deception. As early as the 1220s, masters in the faculty of arts claimed a certain autonomy from the theological faculty, the right to a philosophical and natural as opposed to theological and supernatural perspective. By institutionalizing the split between theology and the other faculties, the university institutionalized a system of studies practically demanding that, in some sense, things be considered outside their immediate relation to God.
While the institutional and pedagogical imperatives of the medieval university might provide some explanations for the conceptual distinctions at work in Scholastic discussions of truth and lies, they don’t explain why theologians almost inevitably used these distinctions as excuses to expand the limits of acceptable speech. No doubt one factor at play is the extremity of Augustine’s prohibition, an extremity that attracts and troubles even modern ethicists, not to mention Augustine himself.76 Another factor, more immediately relevant to the thirteenth century, was the moral and pastoral expectations that the mendicant religious orders placed on their members to live a life of witness in both word and deed. It was an obligation that brought problems concerning truth and falsity, appearance and reality, simulation and deception, to the foreground.77 University theologians not only experienced these anxieties in their role as preachers, but studied and wrote about them in numerous handbooks designed to assist their brothers. In his thirteenth-century guide On the Formation of Novices, for example, the Franciscan David of Augsburg gives voice to these concerns when he suggests that there will be times when even the best of novices must present a false front. “If you should lack interior devotion,” he writes, “at least humbly maintain discipline and a grave exterior demeanor out of reverence for God and as an example to others.”78 No Scholastic theologian would have objected to this advice, would have judged such behavior to be deceitful, but it is worth noting that
Scholastic discussions of lying almost inevitably conclude with discussions of hypocrisy, discussions themselves that almost inevitably focus on those who present themselves as holy while lascivious or at least lukewarm emotions stir within them. What exactly is the difference between laudable deception and vile hypocrisy?79
These are concerns that move us to the very heart of mendicant life—to the public preacher with his duty, not merely to edify and instruct his audience, but also to move and excite them with the desire to confess. In this respect, the thirteenth-century Dominican Humbert of Romans’s On the Formation of Preachers is unique only because of its sustained examination of the preacher’s need to cultivate his public persona. Humbert makes it clear that the preacher must adapt his words and appearance to an ever-changing set of circumstances and audiences, while simultaneously maintaining a careful watch on his intentions. The preacher must make sure that the dramatic and rhetorical effects he deploys are never intended for self-glorification but only for the good of his listeners.80 Dominican and Franciscan training manuals and exempla indicate how difficult maintaining this balance could be. Writing in the fifteenth century, the Dominican Johannes Nider confronts the problem directly in his discussion of hypocrisy when he asks if a person sins who simulates sanctity to edify his neighbors. Clearly, Nider answers, a person who simulates holiness to win fame and renown sins, but consider a different case. Imagine a member of the church, a priest or mendicant who, when he preaches to the laity, pretends to be holier than he would ever dare pretend when with his fellow brothers. If he does this for the sake of more effectively edifying his audience, Nider reasons, not only does he not sin, but his actions are meritorious. Nider looks to the story of the bishop Diego, a friend of Dominic, the founder of Nider’s order, to support this bit of justified fakery. Disgusted at the pomp and pageantry of the abbots he met in 1206 in the south of France, Diego declared they would do a much better job of converting the Albigensians if they presented themselves on foot and in blessed poverty, rather than on horseback and in fine clothes.81 While Diego meant this as both a bit of sound advice and a rebuke of ecclesiastics whose faith had gone tepid, there is no hint of critique or correction in Nider, merely permission to pretend to a sanctity one doesn’t possess, a simulation rendered virtuous through intent and calculated outcome.
EQUIVOCATION, MENTAL RESERVATION, AND AMPHIBOLOGY
Thirteenth-century theologians bequeathed their successors a set of questions to be repeatedly pondered and answered. When is simulation and pretending acceptable, and when is it nothing but base duplicity? What distinguishes concealing the truth from fabricating its false likeness? Long-standing and unquestionable interpretations of scripture helped to generate these questions and to provide clues to their solution. Theologians knew that Jacob was not guilty of duplicity when he pretended to be his brother Esau and that Christ did not offend against truth when he pretended to walk past the village of Emmaus. They knew this, just as they also knew that Abraham did not lie when, asked if Sarah was his wife, he responded, “She is my sister.” Thanks to Augustine’s prohibition against lies, these interpretations of biblical narrative had achieved the status of exemplary facts in need of an explanation, and the entire Catholic theological discourse on lies and deception can be read as a vast exercise in abductive reasoning, a search for the most reasonable set of premises to support them.82
External pressures also shaped this search. As human beings, theologians experienced the challenges and dilemmas that the world posed to the religious and laity alike. As preachers, they experienced the complicated dialectic between performer and audience, between appearance and reality, between simulation and dissimulation. As institutionally sanctioned authorities, they were expected to reflect on all these topics, to offer advice and guidance. Even the sacraments could generate dilemmas about truth and falsity. In sixteenth-century Spain this became strikingly obvious when the confessor’s duty to maintain the secrecy of sins heard in confession, an injunction already made clear in 1215 in the canons of Lateran IV, came into conflict with the Inquisition’s desire to root out and extinguish heresy. To what extent should priests protect secrets learned in confession? When pressed, could a confessor deny having heard what he in fact had heard in the private forum of confession? And there would be additional pressures, especially in the wake of the Reformation as Catholics and Protestants, persecuted and threatened with torture or death, wondered if they could, in deed and in act, pretend to beliefs they in no way accepted, publicly reject beliefs they privately held.83
The popular and influential fifteenth-century Florentine bishop Antoninus set the stage for much of what was to follow in his Summa of Sacred Theology. Reflecting on those ever-popular biblical examples, Antoninus offers a simple principle for distinguishing between sinful and sinless simulation. Our simulations and pretenses are sinful only when they signify nothing and are made up out of whole cloth. When they refer to something, an idea, a lesson, a sacred mystery, they are not lies but “figures of the truth.” Jacob’s claim to be his brother refers to the future favor that Christians will see in God’s eyes, and when Jesus pretends to walk past the village of Emmaus, he is figuring his future ascent into heaven.84 Nider, who was one of Antoninus’s contemporaries, would explain this distinction between simulations that refer to something and those that refer to nothing in terms of the difference between concealing and deceiving. Referencing Thomas Aquinas, Nider explains, “A person verbally lies when he signifies what is not, not when he is silent about what is, which is sometimes allowed.” By extension, Nider suggests that simulation is sinful when, through deeds, we signify something that is not, not if someone neglects to signify what is. “This is why,” Nider concludes, “a person can hide his sin without sin.”85 The existence of this hidden meaning, higher lesson, or invisible reference renders true what would otherwise be a lie.
With this principle in mind, fifteenth-century theologians began to explore the connections among words, contexts, and both the speaker’s and listener’s intentions, between what others might take our words to mean and what we intend them to mean. Antoninus addresses these connections when he takes up the question of concealment. “It is sometimes licit to hide the truth when necessary,” he writes, “and this pertains to prudence.” Although he does not cite Thomas, his Dominican predecessor’s discussion of concealment during moments of peril clearly frames Antoninus’s explanation. Antoninus turns to the tried-and-true story of Abraham’s assertion that Sarah is his sister. Like previous theologians, Antoninus agrees that this is not a lie, because Sarah was both Abraham’s wife and half sister, but Antoninus takes the analysis a step further, deriving from it a rule for determining when our concealments are licit. “When there are many reasons for something, an agent, free from the vice of lying, can assign one of the lesser reasons, remaining silent about the others.” To explain this, Antoninus looks to the story of Samuel, whom the Lord sent to Bethlehem to announce that Isai’s youngest son David was to replace Saul as king of the Jews. When Samuel expresses concern that Saul would rather kill him than allow this news to be spread, the Lord advises Samuel to bring along a calf for Isai to sacrifice. Arriving at the gates of Bethlehem, calf in tow, and asked if he comes to the town peaceably, Samuel responds, “Peaceably, I am come to sacrifice to the Lord, sanctify yourselves and come with me to the sacrifice.” As Antoninus notes, Samuel does not lie. He simply conceals his principal reason for coming to town while offering up another true, but secondary, reason.86
Antoninus then adds that it is perfectly acceptable to employ sophistical words and equivocal expressions for the sake of countering evil. Specifically, Antoninus notes that we can take advantage of words with multiple meanings, using them so that our listeners will understand them one way while we understand them in another. If asked by persecutors whether a man they intend to kill passed this way, it is acceptable to respond, “He did not pass here,” by which we mean he did not pass over the very spot on which we st
and. While this example clearly plays on the equivocal meaning of the word “here” in conjunction with an added mental qualification specifying which meaning the speaker intends, Antoninus’s next example seems to do something more. A priest approaches the entrance to a city, and the gatekeeper asks whether he has money to pay the entrance fee. Although the priest has the money, he responds no. Antoninus contends that this is not a lie so long as the priest intends his response to mean, “I do not have the money in the sense that the religious are not obligated to pay such fees.” Although the priest intends this hidden meaning, Antoninus adds, he intends the gatekeeper to believe that he has no money whatsoever. To support this practice, Antoninus invokes the story of Tobit’s meeting with the angel Raphael, who had taken form of a beautiful young man. When Tobit asks who he is, Raphael responds that he is one of the children of Israel, Azarias son of Ananias. Much like Jacob before Isaac, Antoninus claims that Raphael’s words, literally false though they may be, are made true through the angel’s intention to speak figuratively, to give them a special meaning indicating his true identity as a glorious creature worthy of seeing and helping God.87