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

by Dallas G. Denery II

  In cases like these, the line between licit simulation and sheer duplicity, between concealment and lying, becomes vanishingly fine, perhaps nonexistent. All of Antoninus’s methods of concealment depend on forms of mental reservation, the speaker’s silent specification of meaning, his intent that his words mean something other than what an ordinary listener would take them to mean. As Antoninus makes clear in his discussion of the priest at the city gates, the priest wants the gatekeeper to believe he has no money at all. This bit of misdirection is possible because of the difference between thought and speech, but that very difference implicates Antoninus’s technique in the very duplicity that defines the liar. Antoninus knows this well, as he makes clear early on in his discussion of lies, when he writes, “Where there is a doubleness of heart such that one says one thing and intends something else, there is a lie.” While it is possible that equivocal words (like “here”) might avoid the charge of speaking against one’s mind, it is much more difficult to make that argument in the case of the priest at the city gates. It becomes more difficult still when, following both Bonaventure and Thomas, Antoninus locates the perfection of lying in the “intention of generating a false opinion in the listener” and several lines later defines duplicitous and sinful simulation as rooted in the intention to deceive.88 In these cases, there is every intention to deceive.

  Although Antoninus seems oblivious to this potential inconsistency, he certainly recognizes the potential for these techniques to be abused, and he sets limits on their legitimate employment. We can equivocate to forestall evil, but we should never silently qualify our words (à la the priest at the gate) when such reservations will cause scandal if discovered or when a just judge questions us.89 Subsequent theologians would take a similar tack to avoid abuse. Sylvester Prierias, a Dominican writing late in the fifteenth century, following Antoninus, divides the various types of licit concealment into four distinct categories, the last, like Antoninus’s priest at the city gates, involving mental reservation. Imagine we are asked about something that we are not free to discuss. In such cases, we can respond that we do not know, while to ourselves adding the appropriate clause to render our statement true. Sylvester looks to the Gospels for support. When Mark asks Christ when the day of judgment will occur, the Lord responds that he doesn’t know, no doubt adding to himself, or so Sylvester believes, “such that I should reveal it to you.” Significantly, Sylvester begins this entire discussion with a crucial caveat. We are free to employ these techniques only in those cases in which we are not bound to respond according to our questioner’s intentions and, at the very end of his discussion, warns that we must avoid all these methods of concealment when they might give rise to scandal, when we are before a just judge, or when they concern something that we are bound to confess. Exceeding these limits, our words will become dishonest, and we will become liars.90

  While everyone who had written on the subject agreed that context and intention shape the severity our lies, whether they are malicious or beneficial, whether they are mortal or venial, they also agreed that the difference between telling the truth and telling a lie was an entirely private and internal matter, depending solely on the speaker’s intention to make a false assertion. While it might well have public consequences, the essence of the lie itself had nothing to do with the liar’s audience and everything to do with the liar’s decision to let his words misrepresent his thoughts. It doesn’t matter what Isaac understands when Jacob claims to be Esau, just as it doesn’t matter what the Egyptians understand when Abraham tells them that Sarah is his sister. It doesn’t matter if they are deceived (which they are—Alexander of Hales had already admitted as much, as if what is obvious requires admitting), all that matters is what the speaker says and what the speaker intends, and if the speaker intends a true statement, then he has not lied. Having over the centuries worked through what, in retrospect, can only seem like the necessary implications of Augustine’s interpretation of scripture, though certainly not his Christology, these fifteenth-century writers suddenly uncovered a nearly limitless range of seemingly licit, deceptive, yet nonmendacious, communication.

  This entirely internal and self-referential conception of lying helps to explain why the various limits that Antoninus and Sylvester place on the use of mental reservation seem so ad hoc and irrelevant to the question of our honesty and dishonesty. Since the difference between thought and speech no longer determines whether we lie, Antoninus and Sylvester have little alternative but to look to context as a moral check on the words we use. In response to the exact same question, we can offer the exact same response, and yet, they contend, depending on the situation and the person with whom we are speaking, our words and intentions remaining entirely unchanged, we may be telling the truth or speaking a lie. The internal incoherence of this effort stems from the disconnect between intention and context in traditional conceptions of mendacity. Whether or not our words cause scandal or stave off evil, whether we are responding to a just or unjust judge, or are speaking with someone to whom we are or are not obligated to respond, are entirely different questions from whether our responses are true or false. The entire point of these techniques, or so claimed their supporters, is that they keep us from lying, and this means they do not depend on the speaker making a false assertion. If the use of mental reservation, selective response, and equivocation in and of themselves do not entangle us in lies, then it should hardly matter why we use them so long as we don’t use them for sinful purposes, and even if we do use them for sinful purposes, they are still not lies. Our intentions might be evil and our sins many, but our words remain true.

  It was Martin Azpilcueta, more famously known in his day as Dr. Navarrus, who resolved this incoherence. An Augustinian canon and professor of canon law at the university of Salamanca before moving to Rome, where he died in 1586, Navarrus argued that the very nature of language rendered silent qualifications to our spoken words perfectly truthful.91 Navarrus made this case most fully in his Commentary on the Chapter “Human Ears,” a philosophically tinged reflection on a famous passage from Gregory the Great’s Moralia on Job. “The ear’s of men judge our words as they sound outwardly,” Gregory writes, “but the Divine judge hears those things we profess within ourselves. Men know each other’s will and intention through various words; but we shouldn’t consider words, but the will and the intention, for the intention ought not depend upon the words, but the words on the intention.” To test the implications of the idea that God hears both our spoken and our silent words, Navarrus considers a case of decidedly devious behavior. Imagine that a man, with no intention of making good on his vow, privately tells a woman, “I take you for my wife.” Later, when a judge asks him, “Did you speak those words,” the man responds that he did not, adding silently to himself, “with any intention of actually doing so.” Navarrus then asks three questions: Did the man lie before God? Even if he didn’t lie before God, did he perjure himself before God? And, finally, even if he neither lied nor committed perjury, did he commit some other sin?92

  While the idea that God hears, sees, and understands all our communicative acts is hardly a controversial idea, Navarrus draws a rather unexpected consequence from it. If it is true that God understands both our spoken and silent words, then he can understand sentences and ideas composed out of both as single statements. “Through which it is obvious,” Navarrus concludes, “that the man did not lie before God because in his divine majesty he knows and sees the truly intended sense,” and this is case even though the judge or anyone else who heard what the man said would judge the statement to be false. Navarrus finds additional support for his theory of “mixed speech” or “amphibology” in the writings of the dialecticians who teach that there are many different kinds of language, “purely mental, purely vocal, purely written and a mixture of these.” When we judge the truth or falsity of our own or someone else’s statements, we need to take all these parts into account. Imagine the following mixed statement, Navarrus of
fers by way of example, “God is an angel,” of which the first two words are spoken aloud, the last two mentally. Although the spoken part is perfectly orthodox, the statement as a whole must be considered heretical. Navarrus, picking up on an argument from Prierias, even suggests that scripture and Church practice supports this conception of mixed language. “Our lord Jesus Christ, who was and is the way, the truth and the life,” Navarrus argues, employed amphibology when he claimed not to know the date of the final judgment. Considered as purely vocal speech, Christ’s claim is surely false because he knows all things most truly, but when taken in conjunction with its mental qualification, “such that I should reveal it to you,” the statement is true. The privacy of confession likewise demonstrates the reality of mixed speech. When asked if a confessant committed some sin, the Church considers it perfectly acceptable and honest for the confessor to respond, “No he did not,” even if he did, so long as the confessor has added the appropriate mental statement to render the completed statement true.93

  Although Navarrus agrees that every lie is a sin, that the essence of the lie rests in false assertion, its perfection in the desire to deceive, the theory of mixed language is utterly foreign to the spirit of Augustine’s thought.94 Augustine had rooted his objection against lies in Christ’s incarnation as the Word made flesh and his willingness to witness Truth publicly and openly on the cross. It was the incarnation that demanded the identity between inner thought and spoken word, guaranteeing that false assertion was necessarily sinful. By contrast, Navarrus’s theory of mixed statements creates the possibility that no matter what we say, we will never have to speak against our mind. Antoninus and Sylvester had attempted something similar but failed to offer an internally consistent account of why mental reservations were at times truthful, at other times mendacious. They were, therefore, compelled to look to external factors to discriminate honesty from dishonesty, even as their definition of what it meant to lie remained entirely internal to the liar. Navarrus sidesteps this entire problem, offering a theory of language that guarantees the honesty of mental reservations. Given the amphibological nature of language, properly conceived mixed statements are never lies. His test case makes this abundantly clear. The man who privately tells a woman “I take you for my wife” neither lies nor perjures himself when he tells the judge that he never vowed marriage to her, adding silently to himself “with the intent of actually marrying her.” If his statement is not a lie, then, considered on its own, neither is it a sin. It is, in a sense, morally neutral. With the question of dishonesty bracketed, context, circumstance, and intention will entirely determine whether the man’s actions are sinful or not. In fact, having undone the link between dishonesty and deception, Navarrus creates the possibility of honest deceptions, deceptions in no way tainted by sin. Our simulations are good, “useful” as Jerome put it, when we use them “prudently and ordinately with just cause, and without evil intent and foxlike craftiness [astutia vulpinus], and apart from any lying words or deeds.” By contrast, they are bad when we simulate “evilly and inordinately without just cause, or not caring whether or not they lie.”95 In this case, the man acted with evil deceit [dolo malo] if he deceived the woman in order to have sex with her outside wedlock. On the other hand, if he deceived her in order to keep himself unmarried and, therefore, able to enter holy orders, he acted with good deceit [dolo bono].96

  The theory of mixed speech represents something like the culminating moment of an ethical trajectory begun some four hundred years earlier in Peter Lombard’s Sentences. If the entire tendency of Scholastic thinking about lies had been to frame their moral status in terms of the world, in terms of good achieved or evil avoided, in terms of intention and circumstance, Navarrus completes this process. Language, now liberated from theology, becomes entirely part of the world and, as part of the world, becomes good or bad, rewarded or punished, depending on its relations to the world. Not only are we perfectly right to use mixed statements when unjust judges or evil questioners interrogate us, we can also employ them to avoid all sorts of “negligent” sins committed in the course of daily life. If a friend asks us for money or for a book, we are free to respond “I don’t have it” even if we do, so long as we silently add, “such that I would give it to you.” Mixed speech also has great political value, Navarrus adds, and even kings have been known to use it, telling pleasant falsehoods rendered true through silent adumbration to members of their court.97

  There were dangers here, and Navarrus’s critics noted them. Theologians had long argued that the fabric of society would collapse if lies were sometimes thought to be acceptable, and that collapse seemed all the more imminent in a world of mixed speech. Citing Angelus of Clavasi and Prierias, along with Navarrus, as the main proponents of mixed speech, the sixteenth-century Jesuit theologian Juan Azor feared that if such subterfuge were freely allowed, “every sort of lie could be excused,” and “all human intercourse and charity destroyed.”98 By lumping Navarrus together with Angelus and Prierias, it is not at all clear if Azor appreciates the crucial differences between their theories. Certainly Navarrus would have denied that his theory sanctioned any type of lie. Subtleties aside, Azor admitted the licit use of mental reservations, while simultaneously placing the same sorts of limits on them as had Angelus and Prierias. Navarrus had done the same, arguing that mixed statements are licit when employed for just causes, when they do not offend against charity, when we are not bound to respond in the sense our interrogators or questioners understand. When we violate these limits, our words become sinful but not mendacious. By contrast, Azor and most of the other Jesuits who came after Navarrus, who would reject the theory of mixed language while accepting more traditional versions of mental reservation, argued that when we exceed the limits of just cause our words become lies.99

  These specific differences must not obscure how all these later writers had reversed the role of context in the discourse of lies. Scholastic theologians, interested in pushing the range of licit speech, looked to intention and circumstance to reduce the culpability of certain sorts of lies, to render them merely venial and almost negligible. With the theory of mixed statements and the practice of mental reservation, theologians looked to context and the notion of just cause to restrain a theory of language that threatened to make it impossible ever to know how to understand the meaning of a speaker’s words. Let loose into the world, it seemed as if only the world could help hold back our deceit.

  FROM PASCAL TO AUGUSTINE AND BEYOND

  Like Juan Azor before him, Pascal most likely did not perceive the difference between Navarrus’s theory of mixed speech and the Jesuit doctrines of equivocation and mental reservation that he pilloried in his Provincial Letters. It wouldn’t have mattered if he had. Pascal’s disdain for such techniques was not rooted in the niceties of detail but in the rejection of an entire theological conception of ourselves and our place in the world that Henry Hammond would describe as the “mystery of Jesuitisme.” As it turned out, it was not exactly a Jesuit mystery, even if Jesuit theologians were the ones who had refined and promoted it, written about it, defended it and, in time, popularized it. Its immediate roots could be traced back to the writings of fifteenth-century theologians like the Dominican friar Antoninus of Florence and the Augustinian canon Martin Azpilcueta, and its conceptual possibility extended even further back, to the medieval university, to John Duns Scotus, Thomas Aquinas. and to Peter Lombard’s Sentences. Pascal’s critique begins at precisely that point where Scholastic writers first diverged from Augustine, when they took seriously the idea that they could evaluate the moral gravity of our lies, deploying ideas about intention and context, the civil, the political, means and ends, to determine which are mortal and which are venial.100

  Pascal makes this case most clearly in the seventh of his Provincial Letters when he accuses the Jesuits of being more concerned with policy than with religion. Learning Jesuit views concerning the right to kill another in defense of one’s honor or in retali
ation for slander or “a saucy gesture,” Montalte (Pascal’s stand-in) reminds the Jesuit father with whom he is speaking that God prohibits killing. The Jesuits agree with God’s prohibition, the father responds, but they have their own reasons for accepting it. Quoting a fellow Jesuit, he clarifies: “Although the opinion that we may kill a man for calumny is not without its probability in theory, the contrary one ought to be followed in practice; for in our mode of defending ourselves, we should always avoid doing injury to the commonwealth.”101 At the heart of this approach to morals, Pascal contends, is a turn from God to the world, a turn rooted in the sin of pride and a self-love capable of justifying any desire, forever transforming falsehoods into apparent truths, as we unknowingly drift further from any hope of salvation.102 And so it is, Pascal contends, that the Jesuits find it perfectly reasonable to modify any tenet of faith as they see fit. Even the most fundamental beliefs about Jesus Christ are ripe for reinterpretation. “Where the doctrine of a crucified God is accounted foolishness,” the Jesuit father blithely announces to a horrified Montalte, “they suppress the offense of the cross and preach only a glorious and not a suffering Jesus Christ.”103 What is left, Pascal argues, is nothing but a “criminal neutrality” in which the Jesuits remain utterly indifferent to what is true and what is false, to the Gospel and their own ideas, as they forge a horrible alliance between Jesus Christ and the Devil.104