by Ian Leslie
* * *
The Bible isn’t as clear on the subject of lying as Nollie believed. It’s often assumed that the Ten Commandments include an injunction not to lie. This isn’t quite so. The closest to one is the ninth commandment (the eighth for Catholics and Lutherans): ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.’ This is clearly a prohibition of perjury, but it doesn’t expressly forbid any form of lying (the commandment’s wider, metaphorical resonance is a question of interpretation). The New Testament isn’t much help either. Jesus doesn’t explicitly address the question of whether or not it’s ever right to lie, which perhaps suggests it wasn’t a very important issue to him or his first followers.
The Bible’s ambiguity meant that during the first few hundred years of Christianity its major thinkers were vague and contradictory on the question of lying. Some noted that the scriptures contain episodes that appear to endorse deception: God deceives Abraham into thinking he must kill his son Isaac, as a means of testing his faith; Jacob, in collusion with his mother Rebekah, deceives his father into thinking that he is Esau, his brother; in the book of Exodus, the Egyptian midwives lie to the Pharoah, with God’s approval, in order to save the Hebrew children. In the New Testament, Jesus appears to two disciples on the road to Emmaus, following his death and resurrection, and pretends to be someone else. Some Christian scholars interpreted such instances as evidence that the Bible considered lying to be legitimate when it was in the service of a righteous cause.
This changed in the fifth century, when Augustine entered the debate. In two magisterial surveys of the subject, On Lying and Against Lying, Christianity’s greatest philosopher transformed the church’s thinking on the matter, and exerted a profound influence on future generations, including our own; it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that Augustine invented the modern concept of lying. He laid down two fundamental precepts: first, he defined a lie, with greater clarity than ever before, as a ‘false statement made with the intention to deceive’. This is the imperfect but workable definition that most discussions of lying still use as a starting point. Second, he unequivocally pronounced lying as morally wrong, regardless of context and without exception.
Augustine argued that God had given speech to men so that they could make their thoughts known to each other. Using it to deceive is therefore a sin, because this is the opposite of what God intended. He also identified lying as a threat to the authority of the church. If Christians allowed for the possibility of a white lie (the ‘helpful lie’) then the whole edifice of Christian belief and practice risked corruption and, ultimately, collapse, because ‘whenever someone finds something difficult to practise or hard to believe, he will follow this same dangerous precedent and explain it as the idea or practice of a lying author.’ He concluded that every lie must be defined as a sin, even a lie told to preserve someone’s life. To the person asked to betray the whereabouts of an innocent person to a murderer, Augustine’s advice was to answer ‘I know where he is but will never disclose it,’ regardless of consequences.
Even Augustine didn’t argue, though, that all lies are sins of equal gravity. He put together a hierarchy of lies, depending on how difficult it was to pardon them. Here’s the list, with the least forgivable at the top:
1. Lies in teaching religion
2. Lies which hurt someone and help nobody
3. Lies which hurt someone but benefit someone else
4. Lies told for the pleasure of deceiving someone
5. Lies told to please others in conversation
6. Lies which hurt nobody and benefit someone
7. Lies which hurt nobody and benefit someone by keeping open the possibility of their repentance
8. Lies which hurt nobody and protect a person from physical defilement.
The next major treatise on the subject was written by the Italian scholar Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Aquinas accepted Augustine’s basic framework – that lying involved intent to deceive and that it was always sinful – but added further distinctions and qualifications. Aquinas didn’t mind a joke: lies told in jest were not mortal sins in his book. Nor did he consider unpardonable the kind of helpful lie that Augustine railed against. Only malicious lies – ‘lies told to do harm’ – were impossible to forgive.
For the first fifteen hundred years of Christianity’s existence, the morality of lying was largely a matter of rarefied debate amongst scholars. After Martin Luther made his incendiary declaration at Wittenberg, and the church split asunder, lying became a question of survival.
If ever there was an Age of Deceit, it was in Europe at the turn of the seventeenth century. Relatively tolerant attitudes to religious diversity had given way to widespread persecution, inquisitions, and thought control. Thousands of religious leaders – Catholics, Protestants and Jews – were forced to choose between staying true to their faith, and exile or death; many chose to pretend to be something, or someone, they were not. At the same time, governments were extending control over their subjects (the murderer at the door was often a civil servant), and the practice of politics was beginning in earnest. Royal courts were growing in size and sophistication, drawing more and more ambitious, career-minded young men towards the luminous centre of power. Ordinary people became used to the idea of politicians (or courtiers, in those days) as ruthless liars who would say anything to advance their own interests.
England in particular was seized by what the literary critic Lionel Trilling termed ‘cultural paranoia’. Its writers and thinkers were simultaneously gripped and appalled by the phenomenon of deceit. Francis Bacon, a reader of Machiavelli, analysed the art of self-concealment, concluding that it was best ‘to have openness in fame and opinion; secrecy in habit; dissimulation in seasonable use; and a power to feign, if there be no remedy’. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, revolted by the courtly fashion for dissembling, says, ‘Nay, I know not “seems”, and I have that within which passes show.’ The plays of Shakespeare are peopled with brilliant liars, elaborate disguises and ingenious forms of deception, as are those of Marlowe, Chapman and Webster. All of these dramatists took as one of their primary themes the difference between what seems and what is, between what a character says and what he or she thinks.
Their audiences were deeply invested in such questions; it wasn’t only priests who faced terrible choices between truth and deceit. Many commoners were forced either to besmirch their deepest beliefs, or to live a lie. Even when only outward conformity was required, an inner hell might be created; in the 1550s Richard Wever of Bristol, a Protestant, drowned himself in a mill-race rather than pollute himself by appearing at Catholic mass. Those unwilling to take such drastic action resorted to various forms of deception, either by attending and then secretly not participating in services, or by sending a proxy to sit in their place with the aim of deceiving the congregation into thinking they had attended.
In royal courts and religious colleges across Europe, learned men were reading and constructing sophisticated defences of dishonesty. The doctrinal rationalisation of deceit was, in the phrase of the historian Perez Zagorin, like ‘a submerged continent’ in the political, religious and intellectual life of the era. To deceive in order to survive or advance was one thing; to deceive while remaining true to God might be allowable. Casuistry, a method of moral reasoning that took each case as it came rather than relying on unbending rules, grew popular among Jesuit scholars in particular.
Casuists searched for loopholes in Augustine’s condemnation of lying. As early as the thirteenth century, Raymund of Pennafort had pondered the question of what to tell the murderer at the door. He proposed that a man might deceive the murderer whose intended victim he has given refuge to by saying non est hic, which can mean either ‘he is not here’ or ‘he is not eating here’. This technique – employing double meanings of words to tell the literal truth while concealing a deeper meaning – became known as ‘verbal equivocation’.
The casuist St Alfonso de Liguori suggested it was permissible to reply ‘I say no’ to a question to which one knew the answer was yes, simply because the speaker doesn’t in fact say ‘no’.29 As priests and commoners across Europe opened doors to find potential murderers interrogating them, casuists pushed the boundaries of equivocation ever further. Eventually they took the momentous step of arguing that a false statement can be made true by the addition of a ‘mental reservation’. That’s to say, you can say something you know to be false if you add words, in your head, that make it true.
The most influential advocate of what became known as ‘the doctrine of mental reservation’ was the Spanish theologian Dr Navarrus, who wrote that there are some truths ‘expressed partly in speech and partly in the mind’. According to Navarrus, the Christian’s overriding moral duty is to tell the truth to God; ‘reserving’ some of that truth from the ears of human hearers is moral if it serves the greater good. For example, the user of mental reservation could reply ‘I know not’ aloud to a human interlocutor but silently add ‘to tell you’, and still be telling the truth. The doctrine’s adherents claimed that Christ himself practised it: he told his disciples that he did not know the Day of Judgement, even though his omniscience meant that he must have known.
In 1606, the English Catholic priest John Ward was asked by his Protestant captors whether he was a priest and whether he had ever been across the seas – that’s to say, studied Catholicism in France or Italy. He replied no to both questions. In fact, both were true. Later, when presented with evidence that his answers were false, he claimed not to have lied, explaining that he had mentally added of Apollo after his first answer, and reserved Indian before ‘seas’ in his second answer.30 By the time Ward was tried, the doctrine of mental reservation was already notorious in England, following the trials of two priests called Robert Southwell and Henry Garnet.
* * *
In 1586, when he was twenty-five, Southwell journeyed to England from France in the company of his older friend Garnet, on a clandestine mission that he knew might result in his death. He was returning to his native country after an absence of ten years. The youngest of eight children, Southwell was raised in a family of Catholic gentry in the Norfolk town of Horsham St Faith. He had been sent to France when he was fifteen to study at a Catholic college in Douai in the north of the country. After attending schools in Paris, and in Tournai in Belgium, he was admitted to the Jesuit college in Rome. He became familiar with the arguments of the casuists and with the doctrine of mental reservation. A gifted student, who also wrote exquisite poetry (Ben Jonson remarked that he would happily destroy most of his own poems in exchange for Southwell’s The Burning Babe), he was ordained to the priesthood in 1584 and within two years had embarked on his mission to England.
As Catholic missionaries, Southwell and Garnet faced mortal danger. Several of their predecessors had been executed and Queen Elizabeth, worried about the threats from Spain and from Rome, viewed every Catholic as a potential traitor. She passed a law stating that any English subject ordained abroad as a priest who remained in England longer than forty days would be put to death, and any person who aided them likewise. Missionaries were forced to do their work disguised as laymen; to assume false names; to take up pretend occupations. They took refuge in Catholic households brave enough to risk harbouring them and willing to construct hiding places in the event of a search. They needed to be ready for dangerous questions at any moment, and to prepare a mental and verbal strategy in the event that they were arrested.
Southwell evaded capture for six years. He was finally caught when betrayed to the authorities by a young woman called Anne Bellamy, the daughter of a family in whose home he had often secretly lodged. In prison he was brutally tortured, as his captors sought to elicit information about his friends and contacts. Apart from admitting that he was a Jesuit priest, Southwell told his interrogators nothing, not even the colour of a horse he was riding on a certain day. In 1595, after three years of imprisonment, he was tried for treason. Anne Bellamy testified that Southwell told her it was acceptable to lie when questioned by the authorities – that if asked whether or not there was a priest in the house she could swear in the negative as long as she added the mental reservation ‘not with the intention to tell you’.
At the trial, the attorney-general Sir Edward Coke seized on this testimony, and accused Southwell of corrupting the morals of the girl with wicked Jesuit doctrine. Southwell, an eloquent defendant, did not deny Anne’s evidence; rather, he argued that the practice of mental reservation was true to the word of God. He posed his own ‘murderer at the door’ question to Coke. What would you do, he asked, if the French king were to invade England, forcing the queen to flee for her life, and you alone knew of her whereabouts? If questioned, would you not deny knowledge of where she was, even under oath, using a mental reservation? Coke’s reply is not recorded, but the chief justice of the court was unpersuaded: ‘If this doctrine should be allowed, it would supplant all justice, for we are men, and no Gods, and can judge but according to men’s outward actions and speeches, not accordinge to their secrete and inward intentions.’
Southwell was declared guilty by the jury and on 20 February 1595 he was sent to be executed at Tyburn. Having been dragged through the streets on a sled, he was allowed to address the people at some length from the scaffold, and did so movingly. He confessed that he was a Jesuit priest, and prayed for the salvation of queen and country. Hung from the noose, he attempted a sign of the cross before expiring. His lifeless body was disembowelled and quartered, the severed head displayed to the crowd. No one gave the traditional shout of ‘Traitor!’
Henry Garnet remained at large until he was arrested in connection with the Gunpowder plot (or the Powder Treason as it was known at the time). Garnet wasn’t directly involved in this Catholic conspiracy to assassinate James I and members of Parliament, but it was thought he had foreknowledge of it, and the government was determined to make an example of him. Their investigators came across a treatise Garnet had composed in 1598, arguing for the legitimacy of equivocation and mental reservation. It was dedicated to his friend Southwell and intended as a defence of his actions. Sir Edward Coke, prosecuting once again, was delighted with this find and made it a centrepiece of the trial.31 He labelled Garnet a ‘Doctor of Dissimulation and Destruction’. Coke declared that God had joined heart and tongue in marriage, equivocation being the ‘bastard offspring’ of ‘speech conceived in adultery’. Garnet was found guilty of treason. On the scaffold in St Paul’s churchyard, he was mockingly bidden by an official to make a full confession and not equivocate. Garnet replied, ‘It is no time now to equivocate.’
* * *
Until the trials of Southwell and Garnet, most people in England had been unaware of the doctrine of mental reservation; laymen had no reason to know of obscure internal debates within the Catholic church. But after their exposure to it via these sensational and widely reported trials they reacted with revulsion and anger. Politicians and Protestants wasted no time in denouncing the doctrine as a prime example of un-English, Jesuitical immorality. To the ordinary man and woman, mental reservation was no more than downright lying dressed up in fancy clothes, all the more hypocritical for claiming not to be what it plainly was. This wasn’t even honest lying.
During the seventeenth century the controversy continued to do significant harm to the reputation of the Catholic church. Pope Innocent XI sought to mitigate what had become a public relations disaster by condemning the doctrine in 1679. This may have saved the church further bad publicity but it didn’t solve the fundamental question of what to do when faced with a choice of lying or self-incrimination.32 As a result, the doctrine of mental reservation survived within the Catholic church long after the Pope’s interdiction. Indeed, it lives on today.
In 2009, a report on the widespread allegations of clerical child abuse in Ireland was published by a commission established by the I
rish government. In it, the report describes, in a tone of some bemusement, the commissioners’ discovery of mental reservation, ‘a concept developed and much discussed over the centuries, which permits a church man knowingly to convey a misleading impression to another person without being guilty of lying.’ An example is given:
John calls to the parish priest to make a complaint about the behaviour of one of his curates. The parish priest sees him coming but does not want to see him because he considers John to be a troublemaker. He sends another of his curates to answer the door. John asks the curate if the parish priest is in. The curate replies that he is not. This is clearly untrue, but in the Church’s view it is not a lie because, when the curate told John that the parish priest was not in, he mentally reserved the words ‘to you’.
Cardinal Desmond Connell, himself under investigation, had explained the concept to the commission:
Well, the general teaching about mental reservation is that you are not permitted to tell a lie. On the other hand, you may be put in a position where you have to answer, and there may be circumstances in which you can use an ambiguous expression, realising that the person who you are talking to will accept an untrue version of whatever it may be – permitting that to happen, not willing that it happened, that would be lying. It really is a matter of trying to deal with extraordinarily difficult matters that may arise in social relations where people may ask questions that you simply cannot answer. Everybody knows that this kind of thing is liable to happen. So mental reservation is, in a sense, a way of answering without lying.
During their investigations the commission discovered that priests were using the old tools of equivocation and reservation to evade inquiries. Marie Collins, who was abused by a Dublin priest, testified that when the Dublin archdiocese said in a 1997 press statement that it had co-operated with the police over her complaint of abuse she was upset because she had good reason to know this wasn’t true. When a priest made inquiries on her behalf he was told by the archdiocese ‘we never said we co-operated fully’.
