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The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment
A bold retelling of the history of lying in medieval and early modern Europe
Is it ever acceptable to lie? This question plays a surprisingly important role in the story of Europe's transition from medieval to modern society. According to many historians, Europe became modern when Europeans began to lie―that is, when they began to argue that it is sometimes acceptable to lie. This popular account offers a clear trajectory of historical progression from a medieval world of faith, in which every lie is sinful, to a more worldly early modern society in which lying becomes a permissible strategy for self-defense and self-advancement. Unfortunately, this story is wrong.
For medieval and early modern Christians, the problem of the lie was the problem of human existence itself. To ask "Is it ever acceptable to lie?" was to ask how we, as sinners, should live in a fallen world. As it turns out, the answer to that question depended on who did the asking. The Devil Wins uncovers the complicated history of lying from the early days of the Catholic Church to the Enlightenment, revealing the diversity of attitudes about lying by considering the question from the perspectives of five representative voices―the Devil, God, theologians, courtiers, and women. Examining works by Augustine, Bonaventure, Martin Luther, Madeleine de Scudéry, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and a host of others, Dallas G. Denery II shows how the lie, long thought to be the source of worldly corruption, eventually became the very basis of social cohesion and peace.
Is it ever acceptable to lie? This question plays a surprisingly important role in the story of Europe's transition from medieval to modern society. According to many historians, Europe became modern when Europeans began to lie―that is, when they began to argue that it is sometimes acceptable to lie. This popular account offers a clear trajectory of historical progression from a medieval world of faith, in which every lie is sinful, to a more worldly early modern society in which lying becomes a permissible strategy for self-defense and self-advancement. Unfortunately, this story is wrong.
For medieval and early modern Christians, the problem of the lie was the problem of human existence itself. To ask "Is it ever acceptable to lie?" was to ask how we, as sinners, should live in a fallen world. As it turns out, the answer to that question depended on who did the asking. The Devil Wins uncovers the complicated history of lying from the early days of the Catholic Church to the Enlightenment, revealing the diversity of attitudes about lying by considering the question from the perspectives of five representative voices―the Devil, God, theologians, courtiers, and women. Examining works by Augustine, Bonaventure, Martin Luther, Madeleine de Scudéry, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and a host of others, Dallas G. Denery II shows how the lie, long thought to be the source of worldly corruption, eventually became the very basis of social cohesion and peace.
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
352 pages, Hardcover
First published December 18, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
April 23, 2021
Lies occur between those we love and trust as much as they do with those we dislike, and even happens among absolute outsiders. But like all human conduct, deceit exists on a gamut, from occasionally undamaging “white lies” to egregious and highly consequential fabrications told to gain money or power. Psychologists don’t all agree on exactly how common lying is, but research suggests that while most people may rarely lie in ways that are intentionally hurtful, pretty much everyone is untruthful, at least in small ways, quite often.
Experts do agree that lying is part of human nature and that it’s endorsed and even encouraged by society.
This is a book about the history of lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment. With one prominent exemption, it is not a history of unambiguous 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 trickery is woven into the very foundation of nature. Plants have evolved to look like insects and insects to look like plants. The bolas spider can discharge a scent so akin to that of a female moth that it lures males to their death.
No one living before the 18th century would ever have claimed that our proclivity for lying was merely natural. Scripture may have conspicuously proclaimed “Every man is a liar,” but that was an observation rooted in much more than mere experiential investigation.
Near the beginning of his meditative treatise ‘On Humility and Pride’, Bernard of Clairvaux, perhaps the most celebrated religious figure of the 12th century, writes that we can understand what it means to be a liar only if we humble and discredit ourselves before God’s truth and in that humiliation experience how wretched we really are.
From the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment, from the serpent to society, as a minimum one of the questions this book hopes to answer is how lying became an accepted occurrence, how religiously inspired accounts of human untruthfulness slowly but surely gave way to accounts that had nothing to do with either God or the Devil.
Human beings would remain liars forever after, but there would no longer be anything celestial or ill-fated in that fact. The Devil’s greatest triumph, even if it meant his own self-annihilation, was to set in motion the long slow process that would one day make a corrupted world seem like the world God had meant to create all along.
More often than not, when historians tell the history of lying and deception, it is a history of early modern Europe, of the 16th and 17th centuries, “the Age of Dissimulation.” Both religious controversies and the centralization of power in the various European states during this period leant particular urgency to questions about the morality of lying and deception.
Protestants in Catholic lands and Catholics in Protestant lands had to ask themselves if it was satisfactory to lie, conceal, or dissimulate their true beliefs in order to avoid jail, torture, and death at the hands of their persecutors, whether they could lie to protect friends and family from similar fates.
To attempt to do justice to these many historical strands, this book does not offer a single monolithic and chronological account of the history of lying. Rather, it presents the history of lying through five separate narratives, each one beginning in the early days of the Catholic Church or the Middle Ages and ending sometime late in the 17th or early in the 18th century.
The book’s organizing question, Is it ever acceptable to lie? is well suited to this project of multiple retellings because it begs us to ask an additional question, a question about who it is that can or cannot sometimes justifiably lie. While theologians, at least when specifically addressing the question of lying in their commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, did not believe specifying the speaker mattered (that is, they believed that the same response applied identically to one and all alike), this was not the case when the question slipped into other sorts of theological discussions or when nontheologians asked the question. Is it ever okay for whom to lie? makes it possible to explore the different facets of this history.
In order to accomplish these various tasks, the following chapters, divided into two parts, tell the history of lying as a response to this question when posed to five different types of speakers in the medieval and early modern world.
The first part considers how theologians addressed the dilemma of lying, the second how non-theologians addressed the problem. Since one of the claims this book makes is that theological attitudes about lying were much more varied than often realized, the first half of the book examines how theologians analyzed lying in three different contexts: in their attempts to understand the nature of the Devil’s deceitful words in the Garden of Eden, when they asked whether God could lie, and, in conclusion, when they asked if it was ever licit for human beings to lie.
Since another claim this book makes is that the opinion of professional theologians did not entirely define medieval attitudes about lying, the second half of the book shifts from the opinions of theologians to the opinions of two very different types of speakers: courtiers, on the one hand, and women, on the other.
The author divides the book into five chapters:
Chapter 1: The Devil
Chapter 2: God
Chapter 3: Human Beings
Chapter 4: Courtiers
Chapter 5: Women
The foremost chapter frames the ontological and metaphysical issues that silhouettes the rest of the book, but also seek to reveal how diverse the theological discussion of deception really was. To discuss lying and the Devil is to ask what precisely he did in the Garden of Eden, how did his words so quickly convince the Woman and, after her, Adam to sin against God’s commandment not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. From very early on, the Church fathers asserted that the serpent’s words were lies precisely because they altered and misinterpreted God’s sacred Word.
Genesis made the danger of misinterpretation obvious, as it spread contagion-like to the Woman, who, responding to the serpent’s lying question, proceeded to alter God’s command yet again. As a result, the Devil came to stand for the prototypical sophist swaying his audience with self-serving lies, the heretical teacher leading his flock away from the clear and inspired holy words of scripture.
The second chapter turns from the Devil’s lie to ask the disconcerting question ‘Can God lie?’
Considered in his essence, most theologians had no doubt that not only could God not lie, he could not even deceive. Beginning with Augustine (who, in part at least, drew on Platonic and Neoplatonic ideas concerning divinity), theologians understood God to be perpetual and static, absolute, sensible and prudent. It was beyond belief for such a being, mismatched with its very essence, to act so incorrectly as to misinform.
Unfortunately, theologians had a rather difficult time squaring this philosophically inspired conception of God with the God described in scripture, a God who speaks, punishes, deceives, lies, and orders others to lie for him.
How, for example, were they to explain away the fact that the entire possibility of human salvation depended on an apparent act of deception?
Taken together, the first two chapters describe the altering relations between the supernatural and the natural, between the Devil, God, and the world.
In both cases, the history of lying divulges a measured process of elucidation and partition as the lines between the natural and supernatural become more discrete, more difficult to cross, as what once were exquisitely inspired features of the world become mere features of the world, ever more loosely tied to divine origins.
The third chapter concludes the discussion of theological opinions about lying. Writing early in the 5th century, Augustine rooted his prohibition against lies in the nature of the Trinity and in the incarnation of Christ as the Word made flesh. When we lie, we undo our image and likeness to God. Every lie is a sin because with every lie we turn away from God.
Scholastic theologians accepted Augustine’s prohibition as authoritative but grounded it, not in God, but in conceptions of justice, that is, in terms of our obligations to ourselves and others.
The fourth chapter considers attitudes about lying among the members of Europe’s ecclesiastical and secular courts. A long tradition, dating back to Rome, consistently depicted the court as a place of deception and mendacity gone wild as status-seeking courtiers did everything in their power to win the notice of their superiors, mislead their equals, and quash their inferiors. In the Middle Ages, especially in the writings of John of Salisbury, the court came to represent most clearly the conditions of life in a fallen world. The response of courtiers to this situation, in the Middle Ages and throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, remained much the same: we must be skeptical; we must employ the tools of rhetoric and the faculty of prudence to determine how we should act and what we should say and, when necessary, when we must lie.
Finally, the fifth chapter rests on the deduction that the problem and fact of lying affected women differently than men. While we all might be liars, only women were thought to be inveterate liars. Greek medical ideas propounding the inferiority of women merged easily with a tradition of biblically based misogyny rooted in the story of the Fall, together forming the notion that all women were feebleminded and inconstant, lacking in both prudence and judgment, and always under the sway of their desires with no qualms about lying to satisfy them. Women were to men, so the analogy went, as the body was to the soul. In other words, women were associated with deceptive coverings, false surfaces, and seductive adornment.
To sum up, the fourth and fifth chapters take up the problem of lying as it appeared to people whose relationship to the world made the problem of lying appear distinctly different than it did to theologians.
No doubt some readers will be surprised that certain topics or writers are barely discussed or not discussed at all. There is nothing on politics and lying, on Renaissance debates about “the reason of state,” nor anything about the truth status of fiction and history. In other words, it is a book about how the problem of lying became our problem, the problem as we know it today.
At the same time, this is a book that hopes to upset a popular narrative that contrasts the medieval and the early modern in terms of diametrically opposed attitudes about lying and the easy contrasts that flow from that opposition.
In order to accomplish these joint goals, this book examines the historical response to one question from a variety of perspectives, the theological and the secular, the uncreated and the created, the masculine and the feminine, revealing, if not the total diversity of opinions, a much greater diversity than historians have previously recognized.
No doubt other perspectives could have been included, but it is difficult to imagine this history without these five perspectives, and certainly these five seem adequate to fulfill this book’s goals.
My best read of 2021 thus far!
Experts do agree that lying is part of human nature and that it’s endorsed and even encouraged by society.
This is a book about the history of lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment. With one prominent exemption, it is not a history of unambiguous 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 trickery is woven into the very foundation of nature. Plants have evolved to look like insects and insects to look like plants. The bolas spider can discharge a scent so akin to that of a female moth that it lures males to their death.
No one living before the 18th century would ever have claimed that our proclivity for lying was merely natural. Scripture may have conspicuously proclaimed “Every man is a liar,” but that was an observation rooted in much more than mere experiential investigation.
Near the beginning of his meditative treatise ‘On Humility and Pride’, Bernard of Clairvaux, perhaps the most celebrated religious figure of the 12th century, writes that we can understand what it means to be a liar only if we humble and discredit ourselves before God’s truth and in that humiliation experience how wretched we really are.
From the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment, from the serpent to society, as a minimum one of the questions this book hopes to answer is how lying became an accepted occurrence, how religiously inspired accounts of human untruthfulness slowly but surely gave way to accounts that had nothing to do with either God or the Devil.
Human beings would remain liars forever after, but there would no longer be anything celestial or ill-fated in that fact. The Devil’s greatest triumph, even if it meant his own self-annihilation, was to set in motion the long slow process that would one day make a corrupted world seem like the world God had meant to create all along.
More often than not, when historians tell the history of lying and deception, it is a history of early modern Europe, of the 16th and 17th centuries, “the Age of Dissimulation.” Both religious controversies and the centralization of power in the various European states during this period leant particular urgency to questions about the morality of lying and deception.
Protestants in Catholic lands and Catholics in Protestant lands had to ask themselves if it was satisfactory to lie, conceal, or dissimulate their true beliefs in order to avoid jail, torture, and death at the hands of their persecutors, whether they could lie to protect friends and family from similar fates.
To attempt to do justice to these many historical strands, this book does not offer a single monolithic and chronological account of the history of lying. Rather, it presents the history of lying through five separate narratives, each one beginning in the early days of the Catholic Church or the Middle Ages and ending sometime late in the 17th or early in the 18th century.
The book’s organizing question, Is it ever acceptable to lie? is well suited to this project of multiple retellings because it begs us to ask an additional question, a question about who it is that can or cannot sometimes justifiably lie. While theologians, at least when specifically addressing the question of lying in their commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, did not believe specifying the speaker mattered (that is, they believed that the same response applied identically to one and all alike), this was not the case when the question slipped into other sorts of theological discussions or when nontheologians asked the question. Is it ever okay for whom to lie? makes it possible to explore the different facets of this history.
In order to accomplish these various tasks, the following chapters, divided into two parts, tell the history of lying as a response to this question when posed to five different types of speakers in the medieval and early modern world.
The first part considers how theologians addressed the dilemma of lying, the second how non-theologians addressed the problem. Since one of the claims this book makes is that theological attitudes about lying were much more varied than often realized, the first half of the book examines how theologians analyzed lying in three different contexts: in their attempts to understand the nature of the Devil’s deceitful words in the Garden of Eden, when they asked whether God could lie, and, in conclusion, when they asked if it was ever licit for human beings to lie.
Since another claim this book makes is that the opinion of professional theologians did not entirely define medieval attitudes about lying, the second half of the book shifts from the opinions of theologians to the opinions of two very different types of speakers: courtiers, on the one hand, and women, on the other.
The author divides the book into five chapters:
Chapter 1: The Devil
Chapter 2: God
Chapter 3: Human Beings
Chapter 4: Courtiers
Chapter 5: Women
The foremost chapter frames the ontological and metaphysical issues that silhouettes the rest of the book, but also seek to reveal how diverse the theological discussion of deception really was. To discuss lying and the Devil is to ask what precisely he did in the Garden of Eden, how did his words so quickly convince the Woman and, after her, Adam to sin against God’s commandment not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. From very early on, the Church fathers asserted that the serpent’s words were lies precisely because they altered and misinterpreted God’s sacred Word.
Genesis made the danger of misinterpretation obvious, as it spread contagion-like to the Woman, who, responding to the serpent’s lying question, proceeded to alter God’s command yet again. As a result, the Devil came to stand for the prototypical sophist swaying his audience with self-serving lies, the heretical teacher leading his flock away from the clear and inspired holy words of scripture.
The second chapter turns from the Devil’s lie to ask the disconcerting question ‘Can God lie?’
Considered in his essence, most theologians had no doubt that not only could God not lie, he could not even deceive. Beginning with Augustine (who, in part at least, drew on Platonic and Neoplatonic ideas concerning divinity), theologians understood God to be perpetual and static, absolute, sensible and prudent. It was beyond belief for such a being, mismatched with its very essence, to act so incorrectly as to misinform.
Unfortunately, theologians had a rather difficult time squaring this philosophically inspired conception of God with the God described in scripture, a God who speaks, punishes, deceives, lies, and orders others to lie for him.
How, for example, were they to explain away the fact that the entire possibility of human salvation depended on an apparent act of deception?
Taken together, the first two chapters describe the altering relations between the supernatural and the natural, between the Devil, God, and the world.
In both cases, the history of lying divulges a measured process of elucidation and partition as the lines between the natural and supernatural become more discrete, more difficult to cross, as what once were exquisitely inspired features of the world become mere features of the world, ever more loosely tied to divine origins.
The third chapter concludes the discussion of theological opinions about lying. Writing early in the 5th century, Augustine rooted his prohibition against lies in the nature of the Trinity and in the incarnation of Christ as the Word made flesh. When we lie, we undo our image and likeness to God. Every lie is a sin because with every lie we turn away from God.
Scholastic theologians accepted Augustine’s prohibition as authoritative but grounded it, not in God, but in conceptions of justice, that is, in terms of our obligations to ourselves and others.
The fourth chapter considers attitudes about lying among the members of Europe’s ecclesiastical and secular courts. A long tradition, dating back to Rome, consistently depicted the court as a place of deception and mendacity gone wild as status-seeking courtiers did everything in their power to win the notice of their superiors, mislead their equals, and quash their inferiors. In the Middle Ages, especially in the writings of John of Salisbury, the court came to represent most clearly the conditions of life in a fallen world. The response of courtiers to this situation, in the Middle Ages and throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, remained much the same: we must be skeptical; we must employ the tools of rhetoric and the faculty of prudence to determine how we should act and what we should say and, when necessary, when we must lie.
Finally, the fifth chapter rests on the deduction that the problem and fact of lying affected women differently than men. While we all might be liars, only women were thought to be inveterate liars. Greek medical ideas propounding the inferiority of women merged easily with a tradition of biblically based misogyny rooted in the story of the Fall, together forming the notion that all women were feebleminded and inconstant, lacking in both prudence and judgment, and always under the sway of their desires with no qualms about lying to satisfy them. Women were to men, so the analogy went, as the body was to the soul. In other words, women were associated with deceptive coverings, false surfaces, and seductive adornment.
To sum up, the fourth and fifth chapters take up the problem of lying as it appeared to people whose relationship to the world made the problem of lying appear distinctly different than it did to theologians.
No doubt some readers will be surprised that certain topics or writers are barely discussed or not discussed at all. There is nothing on politics and lying, on Renaissance debates about “the reason of state,” nor anything about the truth status of fiction and history. In other words, it is a book about how the problem of lying became our problem, the problem as we know it today.
At the same time, this is a book that hopes to upset a popular narrative that contrasts the medieval and the early modern in terms of diametrically opposed attitudes about lying and the easy contrasts that flow from that opposition.
In order to accomplish these joint goals, this book examines the historical response to one question from a variety of perspectives, the theological and the secular, the uncreated and the created, the masculine and the feminine, revealing, if not the total diversity of opinions, a much greater diversity than historians have previously recognized.
No doubt other perspectives could have been included, but it is difficult to imagine this history without these five perspectives, and certainly these five seem adequate to fulfill this book’s goals.
My best read of 2021 thus far!
April 17, 2017
This book is a history of responses to the question of whether it is ever okay to lie. Denery's scope is vast but he argues that the middle ages saw no one response to lying and that far from following Augustine dogmatically, lying could be an unfortunate part of living in a world fallen from perfection. While scholastic writers wrestled with theological issues pertaining to deception, courtiers were no less willing than their early modern counterparts to justify lying. The book's scope is impressive, but Denery never really engages with the antique background of lying that is so prevalent in the patristic and medieval writers he cites, though.
May 9, 2016
Meh, it was okay. I didn't get a sense of Denery's voice at all—the whole book was just quotations and references with a paragraph of Denery's explaining and connecting the quotations. For a primer on lying, this might work for you, but only if you have a solid grasp of history and theology. Otherwise I wouldn't really recommend it.
August 6, 2022
This book attempts to answer the question "Is it ever ok to lie?" by exploring theological and societal literature from the ancient world through the Enlightenment.
My take on it is that the idea behind the book was great, the wealth of information collected and presented was useful, but the way the book was written was terrible. There were way too many quotations and not enough of the author's own voice. Each chapter felt like it was written by a student desperately trying to meet a word count. Many parts were repetitive.
Looking back on it, the subtitle feels a bit misleading as this book hardly reads as a history. It's more of a compilation of quotes accompanied by minimal commentary.
I doubt I'll be returning to this book again anytime soon and I won't be recommending it as suggested reading to anyone.
My take on it is that the idea behind the book was great, the wealth of information collected and presented was useful, but the way the book was written was terrible. There were way too many quotations and not enough of the author's own voice. Each chapter felt like it was written by a student desperately trying to meet a word count. Many parts were repetitive.
Looking back on it, the subtitle feels a bit misleading as this book hardly reads as a history. It's more of a compilation of quotes accompanied by minimal commentary.
I doubt I'll be returning to this book again anytime soon and I won't be recommending it as suggested reading to anyone.
September 6, 2019
this book did not have a protagonist, it was historical fiction. I thought it was very boring mostly because it was hard to understand. It just kept making bible references. it was basically the perspectives from god and lucifer about the whole creating the world and lying to adam and eve. It talks about why saiten what even allowed in the garden in a serpent form, and that being part of gods plan.
I gave this book a 1 stare rating because, I personally do not recommend this book because it was hard to read, it changed subjects a ton without really warning. It was just like reading the bible again from different perspectives.
I gave this book a 1 stare rating because, I personally do not recommend this book because it was hard to read, it changed subjects a ton without really warning. It was just like reading the bible again from different perspectives.
May 12, 2019
perusing this- like the first chapter about adam & eve. sure was a lot linguistic gymnistic in trying to determine cause of the Fall throughout history. One think I noticed- it seems like God was the untruthful one in the dialogue. I wnder why the author hasn't considered this possibility?
Anyway for that first chapter it generated dome insight. Probably continued perusing the book -but not read at full attention...
Anyway for that first chapter it generated dome insight. Probably continued perusing the book -but not read at full attention...
November 8, 2017
Couldn't waste any more time with this one. Incredibly boring and completely frustrating to read when you have a Latter-Day Saint understanding of Genesis. It's not as complicated as this book would have you believe.
June 21, 2019
I liked this book. Maybe it just wasn't a good time to read it. It was kinda like a text book and I didn't want to work that hard with paying attention. Also the author justifies lying sometimes. I'm not sure there are ever good times to lie.
September 29, 2024
I found this in a charity shop and a history of lying sounded fun. It turned out to be much more technical than I had expected with a lot of Christian philosophy. It was still interesting but someone with more knowledge of the subject would undoubtedly get more from the book than I did.
November 27, 2019
Essentially, a history of Xian philosophy from the Early Church to the 18th C. Excellent.
March 10, 2016
If I had been assigned this book in college, I would have been ecstatic. Fascinating topic, a solid writing style, and a lot of citations to help write a paper. Great textbook fodder. But as a semi-educational book to read over lunchtime, The Devil Wins just doesn't quite do the job. It's just a little TOO textbooky to triumph over the stack of other books I could be reading.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews