ON LYING

Dallas G. Denery II, The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) ("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 realize paradise had never existed in the first place." Id. at 256. From the bookjacket: "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. [Denery] shows how the lie, long thought to be the source or worldly corruption, eventually became the very basis of social cohesion and peace.").