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

  The Devil Wins

  The Devil Wins

  A HISTORY OF LYING from the GARDEN OF EDEN to the ENLIGHTENMENT

  DALLAS G. DENERY II

  Princeton University Press

  Princeton and Oxford

  Copyright © 2015 by Princeton University Press

  Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

  In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

  press.princeton.edu

  Jacket art courtesy of briarpress.org. Jacket design by Pamela Schnitter

  All Rights Reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Denery, Dallas G. (Dallas George), 1964–

  The devil wins : a history of lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment / Dallas G. Denery II.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-691-16321-5 (alk. paper)

  1. Truthfulness and falsehood. I. Title.

  BJ1421.D46 2014

  177ʹ.309–dc23 2014006311

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  This book has been composed in 10/13.5 Sabon.

  Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FOR LORRY

  Contents

  Acknowledgments ix

  INTRODUCTION: Is It Ever Acceptable to Lie? 1

  PART ONE: Theologians Ask the Question

  CHAPTER ONE. The Devil 21

  Six Days and Two Sentences Later 21

  The Devil and the Lie 22

  Making Sense of Genesis 1, 2, and 3 28

  The Devil’s Lie from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages 35

  The Devil’s Lie from the Middle Ages to the Reformation 47

  The Prince of This World 52

  From Satan’s Stratagems to Human Nature 55

  CHAPTER TWO. God 62

  Can God Lie? 62

  On Lions, Fishhooks, and Mousetraps 67

  Divine Deception and the Sacrament of Truth 77

  Luther, Calvin, and the Hidden God 88

  René Descartes, Pierre Bayle, and the End of Divine Deception 94

  CHAPTER THREE. Human Beings 105

  Every Lie Is a Sin 105

  Every Sin Is a Lie 110

  Biblical Liars 116

  Augustine among the Scholastics 119

  Institutional Transformations 131

  Equivocation, Mental Reservation, and Amphibology 135

  From Pascal to Augustine and Beyond 145

  PART TWO: Courtiers and Women Ask the Question

  CHAPTER FOUR. Courtiers 153

  Flatterers, Wheedlers, and Gossipmongers 153

  Early Modern Uncertainty and Deception 158

  Uncertainty and Skepticism in the Medieval Court 163

  Entangled in Leviathan’s Loins 169

  Christine de Pizan and Just Hypocrisy 175

  From Lies to Civility 181

  Bernard Mandeville and the World Lies Built 190

  CHAPTER FIVE. Women 199

  Lessons about Lies 199

  All about Eve, All about Women 205

  The Biology of Feminine Deceit 211

  Christine de Pizan, Misogyny, and Self-Knowledge 216

  All Men Are Liars 226

  Madeleine de Scudéry, the Salon, and the Pleasant Lie 237

  CONCLUSION: The Lie Becomes Modern 247

  Notes 257

  Bibliography 303

  Index 327

  Acknowledgments

  This book was a long time in the making and, before that, an even longer time in the putting off. Most of the doing and delaying occurred in three places, and I want to thank people from each of them.

  Cambridge University has become a sort of home away from home. I owe a real debt of gratitude to Richard Newhauser, a great supporter and friend, who led an NEH seminar on the vices in medieval society at Darwin College during the summer of 2004. I began the preliminary research for this book that summer and profited from numerous conversations with Dwight Allman, Stan Benfell, Susan Dudash, Holly Johnson, Tom Parisi, and Derrick Pitard. In 2009, Nicolette Zeeman, along with Kantik Ghosh, Mishtooni Bose, and Rita Copeland, invited me to help organize a conference at King’s College on doubt and skepticism in the Middle Ages. The event allowed me to discuss my work with them, as well as with Hester Gelber, Christophe Grellard, Dominik Perler, and, especially, Eileen Sweeney, who has read various chapters with great care over the years. Two years later, Nicolette invited me back to present several chapters of my book at a three-day work-in-progress seminar during which I had very useful conversations with her, Bill Burwinkle, and Emily Corran. William D. Wood was kind enough to meet me for a beer in Oxford.

  During the 2012–2013 academic year, I was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow at the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University. Under Alan Patten’s leadership, the Center was a convivial and lively place, and between the fellows and faculty at the Center, various other Princeton faculty, and an extraordinary number of visiting speakers, I incurred debts too many to recall. At the Center, I benefited particularly from numerous mobile conversations with Alexander Voorhoeve, as well as with Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Kimberly Ferzan, Samuel Goldman, Christopher Heathwood, Bennet Helm, Nannerl Keohane, and the late, much beloved, Paul Sigmund. In addition, I had the pleasure to meet and talk things historical with Moshe Shluvosky and Sophie Lunn-Rockwell, both of whom were in residence at the Davis Center. I want to thank Rob Tempio at Princeton University Press for his early and continued enthusiasm for this book and books in general.

  At Bowdoin College, a number of colleagues and friends have read and discussed various versions and stages of this book over the years, including Margaret Boyle, Mary Agnes Edsell, Paul Franco, Paul Friedland, Kristen Ghodsee, Page Herrlinger, Ann Kibbie, Aaron Kitch, Robert Morrison, Steve Perkinson, Patrick Rael, Meghan Roberts, Arielle Saiber, and Scott Sehon. It goes without saying that without our superb library staff this book would have been much more difficult to complete, but I must single out Guy Saldanha and everyone at Interlibrary Loan for their amazing facility at quickly tracking down even the most obscure material. Part of the research for this book was funded through a Kenan Family Research Grant, sponsored by the college. Georgia Whitaker and Maya Little helped construct the bibliography on very little notice. I must also thank seven years worth of seminar students who patiently and, hopefully, enjoyably, worked through a litany of biblical commentaries, court treatises, and theological quagmires as I struggled to figure out what this book would be about.

  I want to thank Steven Justice and Stephen Lahey for commenting on early drafts, as well as Lisa Bitel, David Luscombe, Cary Nederman, Daniel Smail, and Nicholas Watson for their various kindnesses. I owe a real debt of gratitude to Jonathan Sheehan for his meticulous reading of the entire manuscript, the anonymous readers who reviewed the book for Princeton University Press, and Will Hively for his expert and attentive copyediting.

  I dedicate this book to my wife Lorry.

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  I have incorporated parts of the following previously published essays into this book: “From Sacred Mystery to Divine Deception: Robert Holkot, John Wyclif and the Transformation of Fourteenth Century Eucharistic Discourse,” Journal of Religious History, June 2005, 129–44; “Biblical Liars and Medieval Th
eologians,” in The Seven Deadly Sins: From Individuals to Communities, ed. Richard Newhauser (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007), 111–28; “Christine de Pizan against the Theologians: The Virtue of Lies in The Book of the Three Virtues,” Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 39:1 (2008): 229–47; “Christine de Pizan on Misogyny, Gossip and Possibility,” in The Middle Ages in Texts and Texture, ed. Jason Glenn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011): 309–21; and “Uncertainty and Deception in the Medieval and Early Modern Court,” in Uncertain Knowledge in the Middle Ages, ed. Dallas G. Denery II, Kantik Ghosh, and Nicolette Zeeman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014): 13–36.

  The Devil Wins

  INTRODUCTION

  Is It Ever Acceptable to Lie?

  Punishment awaits those who lie.

  Dante had little doubt about this, little doubt that unrepentant liars would suffer an eternity of pain, and he devoted much of his early fourteenth-century masterpiece, the Inferno, to describing their torments. As the pilgrim Dante and his guide, the revered Roman poet Virgil, enter the eighth circle of hell, a place called Malebolge, the final, painful residence for the fraudulent and every type of falsifier, they witness flatterers stewing in dung “that might well have been flushed from our latrines” and seducers condemned for eternity to walk naked in endless circles as “horned demons with enormous whips” beat them from behind. Pausing for a moment, Virgil asks his companion to look at one of the figures, a disheveled woman wallowing in excrement, squatting then standing then squatting again, forever scratching herself raw with filth-encrusted fingernails. “It is Thaïs,” Virgil explains, “the whore who gave this answer to her lover when he asked, ‘Am I very worthy of your thanks?’: ‘Very, nay, incredibly so!’ ” Disgusted, Virgil urges his companion to hurry on: “I think our eyes have had their fill of this.”1 Perhaps they have seen more than enough seducers and flatterers, but the variety of deceivers and falsifiers proves limitless. As the two continue farther into the depths of Malebolge, they discover hypocrites struggling under the weight of gold-gilded iron robes, false counselors transformed into heatless flame, a frozen lake filled with traitors submerged to their bellies, their teeth chattering “notes like storks’ beaks snapping shut.”2

  A journey through hell, Dante’s Inferno maps a geography of sin. Though all in hell are guilty, all are not equally punished. The gravity of sin increases the deeper Virgil and the pilgrim descend. Sinners guilty of lust and gluttony, avarice and prodigality, wrath and sullenness, give way to the violent, to murderers and suicides. But worst of all are the fraudulent, all those liars, deceivers, and traitors that fill hell’s final two circles. “Since fraud belongs exclusively to man,” Virgil explains, “God hates it more and, therefore, far below, the fraudulent are placed and suffer most.”3 Those guilty of lust allowed their passions to overwhelm them, like the winds that batter them in hell’s upper reaches, catching them in storms of desire that lay waste to reason. Though their crimes were worse, the same is true of the malicious, of murderers condemned to cook in boiling rivers of blood as fitting justice for the burning rage and greed they let go unchecked, clouding all sense of charity as it drove them toward homicide. Traitors are different. Condemned to suffer forevermore in the arctic depths of hell, they composed their deceitful words with cold calculation, sundering every bond of love and friendship, like Judas before Jesus. When asked if he was the one who would betray the Son of Man, Judas calmly replied, “Surely, not I?”4

  The denizens of hell not only suffer, their suffering poses a challenge to the two travelers. Forever trapped in forms and punishments emblematic of their crimes, the damned are forever doomed to repeat them. Well inside the eighth circle of hell, Virgil and the pilgrim discover that a bridge they had hoped to cross now lies in rubble. When Virgil questions a nearby demon, the creature promises that there are other bridges still standing farther along the path. Although the pilgrim warns his leader to be wary of this information, Virgil accepts it as true, only to discover later that every bridge has collapsed. “Once, in Bologna, I heard discussed the devil’s many vices,” a nearby hypocrite snidely comments. “[O]ne of them is that he tells lies and is the father of all lies.” Virgil stalks off, angry with himself for having been fooled.5

  If Virgil proves occasionally too trusting, the pilgrim responds differently to hell’s challenges. Now in the ninth and final circle of hell, the abode of traitors, Virgil and the pilgrim come across a soul who refuses to name himself, frozen in place, his head bent back with tears turned to pools of ice so that “weeping puts an end to weeping, and the grief that finds no outlet from the eyes turns inward to intensify the anguish.” Blinded and believing the pilgrim to be dead and damned just like himself, the frozen figure cries out, “O wicked souls, so wicked that you have been assigned the ultimate post, break off these hard veils covering my eyes and give relief from the pain that swells my heart—at least until the new tears freeze again.” The pilgrim, doing nothing to correct the suffering soul’s mistake, makes a promise: “If you wish me to help you, tell me who you are, and if I do not extricate you, may I have to go down to the bottom of the ice.” These are misleading words at best, no doubt deceitful, perhaps even dishonest. With Virgil as his guide, the pilgrim knows he will soon descend to the bottom of the ice, the very pit and nadir of hell, fulfilling in some sense the strict letter of his promise, if not its spirit, and certainly not the promise as the soul understands it. Deceived, the soul immediately reveals himself to be Alberigo, a man whose treachery is so great his soul already suffers in hell while his body remains on earth inhabited by a shade. His crime? Under the false pretense of a reconciliation with relatives, he invited them to dine at his house, where he gleefully watched hired hands slaughter them as they ate. “But now extend your hand and open my eyes for me,” the soul cries out. “I did not open them,” the pilgrim reports. “To be mean to him was a generous reward.”6

  If cruelty can become generosity, can lies ever become virtuous?

  This is a book about the history of lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment. With one notable exception, it is not a history of specific lies, of who said what to whom, but a history of responses to a very fundamental, if straightforward, question: Is it ever acceptable to lie? A perennial question, one that remains with us to this day, it no longer means for us what it meant for people who lived during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Reformation. Contemporary behavioral psychologists and evolutionary biologists tell us that deception is woven into the very fabric of nature. Plants have evolved to look like insects and insects to look like plants. The bolas spider can emit a scent so similar to that of a female moth that it lures males to their death. For their part, different sorts of baboons, gorillas, and chimpanzees engage in what can best be described as intentional acts of deception, purposefully leading their fellows away from banana-laden trees only to scurry back unseen to gorge themselves, alone and in peace.7 We humans are little different, and evolution seems to have favored those of us who deceive better than others. If we don’t lie constantly, we certainly lie frequently. One study suggests that during every ten minutes of conversation, we lie three times and even more frequently when we use e-mail and text messaging.8 Contemporary philosophers may debate whether it is ethical to lie, whether the standards and expectations of human society and conduct allow for or prohibit dishonesty, but these debates simply assume that lying is one of many questionable things we do.9

  No one living before the eighteenth century would ever have claimed that our penchant for lying was simply natural. Scripture may have famously proclaimed “Every man is a liar,” but that was an observation rooted in much more than mere empirical analysis. Near the beginning of his meditative treatise On Humility and Pride, Bernard of Clairvaux, perhaps the most famous religious figure of the twelfth century, writes that we can understand what it means to be a liar only if we humble and humiliate ourselves before God’s truth and in that humiliation experience how wretched we really are. Reflecti
ng on the book of Psalms, Bernard writes: “The prophet has humbled himself […] as he says in another Psalm, ‘And in your truth you have humbled me.’ He has been thinking about himself. Now he looks from his own wretchedness to that of others, and so passes to the second step, saying in his ecstasy, ‘Every man is a liar.’ ” But what does it mean to say “Every man is a liar?” It means, Bernard continues, that “every man is weak, powerless, unable to save himself or others.” It means that anyone “who trusts his own strength deceives himself … [for] … he cannot hope for salvation from himself, nor can anyone else hope for salvation from him.”10 To assert that every man is a liar is to say something profound about who we are and how we got to be this way, about our relationship to God and ourselves, to those around us and to the world itself. Every man is a liar because every man is fallen, cast out of paradise, full of pride and utterly at God’s mercy.

  While Bernard’s deeply monastic and religiously severe assessment of human depravity and helplessness may have been more extreme than those of his nonreligious peers, Christian writers from the earliest days of the Church to the seventeenth-century writings of Blaise Pascal, John Milton, and beyond would have agreed with him that the problem of the lie, of lying, was the problem of human existence itself. Its roots dug deep into the ground of ontology, metaphysics, and theology, and reached as far back as the very first moments of human history, a history blasphemed into existence beneath a tree in a garden, in the serpent’s lying words to a woman who would soon be named Eve. For this tradition, human history, the history of fallen man, began with the serpent’s lie, and that lie shaped and marked us, deformed and weakened us. It transformed us into sons of the Devil, liars and sinners both, even as it entangled us ever more tightly in the misery of a life lived in exile from the earthly paradise that God had created for us. Given this history, with all it entailed, the question Is it ever acceptable to lie? was always more than a question about acceptable or unacceptable behavior. It rephrased in the most trenchant form possible a much broader question: How should we live in a fallen world? Should the faithful Christian, when need be, adapt to the ways of a corrupt and deceitful world, lie to the liars, or is such accommodation the very hallmark and sign, root cause and continuing symptom, of our miserable lives as sinners? This account of the human penchant for perversity would begin to unravel, perhaps already in the seventeenth century but certainly in the next, a development most obvious in the writings of the French philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who would look to society as the entirely this-worldly source of human corruption and deceit.