While the late eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant would hardly take so tolerant an attitude concerning lies, his work reveals how fully the problem of lying after Rousseau had become a new problem, our problem. Kant conducts his entire investigation in entirely human terms, examines it as a strictly human phenomenon. “The greatest violation of a human being’s duty to himself regarded merely as a moral being (the humanity of his own person),” Kant writes in the second part of The Metaphysics of Morals, first published in 1798, “is the contrary of truthfulness, lying.” When we lie, whether for charitable or evil reasons, we violate the purpose of human communication, which consists in the honest revelation of our thoughts to another. As a result, when the liar lies, he renounces his personality and becomes “a mere deceptive appearance of a human being, not a human being himself.”21 Kant prohibits lies because falsehood contradicts and debases our very essence as rational beings. “To be truthful (honest) in all declarations,” Kant writes in On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy, a brief essay he published in 1797, “is therefore a sacred command of reason prescribing unconditionally, one not to be restricted by conveniences.”22
Although Kant alludes to scripture, noting that the Bible dates the first crime not to Cain’s murder of his brother Abel but to the first lie, and that “it calls the author of all evil a liar from the beginning and the father of lies,” he does this solely to make a philosophical point. The ground and possibility of the human propensity toward hypocrisy is inaccessible to reason, impossible to deduce from any actual lie itself.23 But for Kant, biblical revelation no longer picks up where human reason fails, offering answers to questions unanswerable to us on our own. In Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History, Kant turns to Genesis to think, not so much about the origin of human mendacity, but about the origin of human freedom. Before proceeding with this biblically inspired thought experiment, Kant carefully qualifies its usefulness. Such speculations, he notes, “should not present themselves as a serious activity but merely as an exercise in which the imagination, supported by reason, may be allowed to indulge as a healthy mental recreation.” Removed from its earlier role as a historical account of the source and origin of all human misery, the tragedy in the Garden now offers the exhausted philosopher a vacation from the hard work of rational inquiry, a “pleasure trip,” as Kant refers to it at one point.24
The ground shifts, and the question of lying finds itself irrevocably separated from God and the Devil. Even as we continue to ask Is it ever acceptable to lie? and even as the answers we come up with appear unaltered (yes, no, sometimes, never), the framework is new. Beneath a settled and seemingly unchanged facade, everything has changed, as if, having lived too long in exile, we one day realized paradise had never existed in the first place.
Notes
INTRODUCTION: IS IT EVER ACCEPTABLE TO LIE?
1. Dante Alighieri, Dante’s Inferno: The Indiana Critical Edition, trans. Mark Musa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), canto 18, in order, ln. 114, 35, 133–36. Virgil’s more general description of Malebolge occurs earlier, canto 11, ln. 52–69: “Fraud, that gnaws the conscience of its servants, / can be used on one who puts his trust in you / or else on one who has no trust invested. // This latter sort seems only to destroy / the bond of love that Nature gives to man; / so in the second circle there are nests // of hypocrites, flatterers, dabblers in sorcery, / falsifiers, thieves and simonists, / panders, seducers, grafters and like filth. // The former kind of fraud both disregards / the love Nature enjoys and that extra bond / between men which creates a special trust; // thus, it is in the smallest of the circles, / at the earth’s center, around the throne of Dis, / that traitors suffer their eternal pain.”
2. Dante’s Inferno, canto 32, ln. 36.
3. Dante’s Inferno, canto 11, ln. 25–27.
4. Matthew 26:25. Unless otherwise noted, all biblical passages come from the New Standard Revised Version, with Apocrypha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). On sin and placement in the Inferno, see Marc Cogan, The Design in the Wax: The Structure of the Divine Comedy and Its Meaning (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 36–75.
5. Dante’s Inferno, canto 23, ln. 142–45.
6. Dante’s Inferno, canto 33, ln. 91–150.
7. On plants, insects, and spiders, see Natalie Angier, “The Art of Deception: Sometimes Survival Means Lying, Stealing or Vanishing in Place,” National Geographic, August 2009, 70–87. On primate deception, Euclid O. Smith, “Deception and Evolutionary Biology,” Cultural Anthropology 2 (1987): 50–64.
8. Robert Feldman, The Liar in Your Life: The Way to a Truthful Relationship (New York: Twelve, 2009), 14–15. On evolutionary aspects of human deception, David Livingstone Smith, Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004), 11–12, writes, “Nature selected those mental capacities that helped spread our genes, and those that proved unhelpful were ineluctably snuffed out. As any seducer knows, honesty and reproductive success are not necessarily good bedfellows. Because deception and self-deception helped our species to succeed in the never-ending struggle for survival, natural selection made them part of our nature.”
9. The contemporary literature on lying is immense. An accepted and accessible starting point for most philosophical discussions is Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1999, 2nd ed.), also, David Nyberg, The Varnished Truth: Truth Telling and Deceiving in Ordinary Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). For lying in politics, see Martin Jay, The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), and for a sociological perspective, J. A. Barnes, A Pack of Lies: Towards a Sociology of Lying (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
10. Bernard of Clairvaux, On Humility and Pride, trans. G. R. Evans, in Bernard of Clairvaux: Selected Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 114. The scriptural passages come from Psalms 118:75 and 115:11 respectively.
11. Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 330. Also, Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), which organizes itself around the era of “high casuistry,” roughly the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There are, of course, histories of medieval attitudes about lying, including a series of essays by Arthur Landgraf, beginning with “Definition und Sündhaftigkeit der Lüge nach der Lehre der Frühscholastik,” Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie 63 (1939): 50–85, as well as innumerable essays and books focusing on specific medieval writers.
12. Zagorin, Ways of Lying, is the authoritative work on this topic. Also, John Sommerville, “The New Art of Lying: Equivocation, Mental Reservation, and Casuistry,” in Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, ed. Edmund Leites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 159–84.
13. Niccolò Machiavelli, “Letter #179, To Franceso Guicciardini, 17 May 1521,” in The Letters of Machiavelli: A Selection of His Letters, trans. and ed. Allan Gilbert (New York: Capricorn Books, 1961), 200. Recent valuable monographs on deception and the Renaissance court include Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, Dis/simulations. Jules-César Vanini, François La Mothe Le Vayer, Gabriel Naudé, Louis Machon et Torquato Accetto. Religion, morale et politique au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002), and Jon Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
14. Snyder, Dissimulation, 184, ft. 23, discusses some of the background to this maxim.
15. Sylvester Prierias, Sylvestrinae Summae, pars secunda, “De Mendacio & Mendace” (Lyon: Mauricius Roy & Ludovicus Pesnot, 1555), 225.
16. Dante, Inferno, canto 27. Fittingly, Guido fell victim to false counsel himself, believing he could commit and repent of a sin at the same time, ln. 98–102: “He asked me
to advise him. I was silent, / for his words were drunken. Then he spoke again: / ‘Fear not, I tell you: the sin you will commit, / it is forgiven. Now you will teach me how / I can level Palestrina to the ground.”
17. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Peter Bonadanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), ch. 18, 58–59. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 13–14, takes this contrast between Dante and Machiavelli as definitive of the differences between medieval and early modern attitudes about truth-telling.
18. Medievalists themselves may have inadvertently abetted this process. Most work on lying in the Middle Ages focuses exclusively on the Augustinian-inflected theological and pastoral traditions, and on what were known as the “sins of the tongue.” See, for example, two very good books, Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio, Les péchés de la langue: Discipline et éthique de la parole dans la culture médiévale, trans. Philippe Baillet (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1991), and Edwin D. Craun, Lies, Slander, and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
19. The best recent book to make these sorts of claims is John Jeffries Martin’s otherwise excellent Myths of Renaissance Individualism (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 7, which attempts “to approach the history of the Renaissance self from a new angle, neither Burckhardt’s nor Greenblatt’s,” arguing instead that “there were multiple models of identity in the Renaissance,” almost always concerned “with what we might call, provisionally at least, the relation of the internal to the external self.” The great virtue of Martin’s methodology, one I have used in this book, is his refusal to reify a Renaissance conception of self, offering instead case studies of different ways different sorts of people adapted to the world. Still, when it comes time to define what is novel about these Renaissance developments, Martin invokes contrasts between medieval theologians and monks and all variety of Renaissance people. See, for example, his discussion of prudence, 48–53, and concordia and sincerity, 109–17.
20. While theologians agreed that any lie was always sinful, there was debate about whether the lies of holy men were worse than the lies of the ordinary religious. See, for example, Bonaventure, Sententiarum, III, in Opera Omnia, 4 vols. (Quaracchi: Collegii S. Bonaventura, 1882–89), dist. XXXVIII, quaest. 847–49, where he asks, “Utrum omne mendacium sit mortale viris perfectis?”
21. For two rather different defenses of the use of “perennial questions” as a mode of historical inquiry, see Mark Bevir, “Are There Perennial Problems in Political Theory?” Political Studies 42 (1994): 662–75, and John Patrick Diggins, “The Oyster and the Pearl: The Problem of Contextualism in Intellectual History,” History and Theory 23:2 (May 1984): 151–69.
22. I use the term “tradition” here in somewhat the same sense as Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 200–220, uses it in his defense of the history of ideas against its contextualist critics. At 203, for example, he writes, “Because traditions persist only through teachers initiating pupils into shared understandings, we must avoid hypostatising them. We must not ascribe traditions an occult or Platonic existence independent of the beliefs of specific individuals. Traditions are not fixed entities people produce by their own activities. The exponents of a tradition bring it into being and determine its progress by developing webs of belief in the ways they do.”
23. Augustine, Against Lying, trans. Harold B. Jaffee, in Augustine, Treatises on Various Subjects, ed. Roy J. Deferrari (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1952), ch. 10 (23), 152.
CHAPTER ONE. THE DEVIL
1. Which is not to say later Jewish interpreters were uninterested in the first couple. See James L. Kugel, The Bible as It Was (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 67–82.
2. Luke 3:23–38.
3. Romans 5:14.
4. Romans 5:12–14.
5. Romans 5:19. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 141–55, notes that it was not until the second century that Irenaeus, developing ideas already present in liturgical practice, provided a theological underpinning for the correspondence between Adam and Christ. For the deeper background, Henry Angsar Kelly, Satan: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 175–82.
6. The best overall review of the history of interpretations of the early chapters of Genesis remains J. M. Evans, ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Genesis Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). On developing conceptions of Satan, see Neil Forsyth, The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). For studies of medieval interpretations, see Eric Jager, The Tempter’s Voice: Language and the Fall in Medieval Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Useful works on Renaissance and Reformation interpretations include Arnold Williams, The Common Expositor: An Account of the Commentaries on Genesis, 1527–1633 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948), Lise Wajeman, La parole d’Adam, le corps d’Eve: le péché originel au XVI siècle (Geneva: Droz, 2007), and Kathleen M. Crowther, Adam and Eve in the Protestant Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). On the seventeenth century, see Philip C. Almond, Adam & Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
7. Augustine, The City of God, trans. and ed. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), bk. 14, ch. 12, 607.
8. Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, The Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, trans. George W. Shea (Tempe: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997), 72.
9. Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis, Chapters 1–5, in Luther’s Works, vol. 1, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and trans. George V. Schick (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1958), 141.
10. Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. John Hammond Taylor (New York: Newman Press, 1982), bk. 11, ch. 6, 139.
11. Jacobus Acontius, Satans Strategems or the Devils Cabinet-Council Discovered (London: John Macock, 1648).
12. 2 Corinthians 1:3.
13. John 8:20–44.
14. Luther, Lectures, ch. 3, 146.
15. Bonaventure, Commentarius in Evangelium S. Ioannis, in Opera Omnia, vol. 6 (Quaracchi: Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1893), 366.
16. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis: 1–17, trans. Robert C. Hill (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1985), 209.
17. Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla, in Bibliorum Sacrorum cum Glossa Ordinaria … et Postilla Nicolai Lyrani (Venice, 1603), col. 1167. The twelfth-century Benedictine abbot and theologian Rupert of Deutz, In Genesim, lib. III, cap. IV, in Opera (Paris: Caroli Chastellain, 1638), 38–39, recognizing that questions are not commonly thought to be true or false, argues that the serpent’s question is a lie because he uses it to conceal his knowledge of God’s prohibition and to lead the woman into disobedience.
18. John Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis, vol. 1, trans. John King (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1847), 146.
19. Psalms 116:11.
20. Romans 3:4.
21. Ambrose, Paradise, in Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel, trans. John J. Savage (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1961), ch. 12 (68), 339. Michael P. McHugh, “Satan and Saint Ambrose,” Classical Folia 26:1 (1972): 94–106, surveys Satan’s presence in Ambrose’s work.
22. Astruc was building on the work and insights of earlier exegetes such as Jean le Clerc and Baruch Spinoza. See Pierre Gibert, “De l’intuition à l’évidence: la multiplicité documentaire dans la Genèse chez H. B. Witter et Jean Astruc,” in Sacred Conjectures: The Context and Legacy of Robert Lowth and Jean Astruc, ed. John Jarick (New York: T&T Clark, 2007), 174–89.
23. For a brief overview of theories concerning these divisions of the text, including contemporary evangelical Christian assertions of a unitary, Mosaically authored text, see Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1–17 (Gran
d Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1990), 2–38. Also useful, Joseph Blenkinsopp, The Pentateuch: An Introduction to the First Five Books of the Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 54–97.
24. Augustine, Literal Meaning of Genesis, vol. 1, bk. 4, 103–45.
25. Calvin, Commentaries on Genesis, ch. 1, 78.
26. Calvin, Commentaries on Genesis, ch. 2, 109.
27. Philo of Alexandria, On the Creation of the Cosmos according to Moses, trans. David T. Runia (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2001), chaps. 22 and 23, 88–90.
The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment Page 30
