The historical significance of lying and dissimilation - Truth-Telling, Lying and Self-Deception

Social Research, Fall, 1996 by Perez Zagorin

In one essential respect, however, the Ketman Milosz depicted was different from its Islamic source. The latter provided to the faithful a sanction or injunction for religious dissimulation derived from the inspired words of the prophet Mohammed and the Koran itself.(6) In Poland and other communist countries, however, those who conformed to their political masters without belief or sincerity had no authoritative doctrinal justification for their accommodation. They had only their personal excuses, rationalizations, and explanations, embracing different motives and reasons such as self-preservation, refusal to accept life in exile, careerism, opportunism, and ambition, loyalty to the people or nation if not the state, and so on.

In the West in past centuries there was a counterpart to Ketman or takiya in certain doctrines which furnished a rationale and justification for dissimulation and lying by individuals belonging to persecuted religious communities. During the later Middle Ages and the early modern era they were used by Christian heretics, Iberian Jews, and by Protestants, Catholics, and sectarians in situations where they faced the danger of persecution. These doctrines affirmed the legitimacy of a false appearance of conformity, in contradiction to one's genuine beliefs, to an untrue, idolatrous, and sinful religion if the alternative were injury or death. They also permitted untruthful devices of speech, like equivocation and mental reservation, to deceive religious enemies.

Behind the doctrines of dissimulation relied on by such persecuted groups lay a millenially long tradition of discussion and argument concerning the licitness of lying and dissimulation, which was based almost entirely on biblical precedents and examples. Dating back to an early time in the history of the Christian church, this discussion was carried on during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the era of the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation by church fathers, moral theologians, canonists, philosophers, casuists, humanist scholars, Protestant reformers and pastors, jurists, and theorists of natural law.(7) Sissela Boks's Lying included a brief appendix of excerpts by a handful of thinkers on the subject of lying, starting with Augustine and Aquinas, passing through Grotius and Kant, and ending with several recent authors. This selection, however, cannot possibly convey a realization of the countless works of moral theology, canon law, and casuistry that dealt with the problem down through the seventeenth century and even beyond. Nor was Bok aware, despite a passing reference to John Calvin's disapproval of the Protestants who concealed their religious views by participating in Catholic worship, of the existence of a full blown doctrine of religious dissimulation and the extent of its importance in the sixteenth century (Bok, 1978, p. 36).

The most important of the many writers in the Christian West who have dealt with lying and dissimulation is the church father Augustine, whose treatment of the subject affected all subsequent discussion. Unconditionally opposed to a lie of any sort, irrespective of its reason, Augustine laid out his views mainly in two short works, On Lying (De Mendacio) and Against Lying (Contra Mendacium), dating from the end of the fourth and the early fifth centuries C.E.(8) His definition of lying--"a false statement made with the intention to deceive"--and his acute analysis of the different kinds of lies, divided into eight categories, were drawn on by innumerable authors. The liar, according to Augustine, was a person who by speech or other action expresses to another what is contra mentem, that is, who speaks contrary to his mind. Augustine was especially concerned with refuting justifications for lying and dissimulation derived from various instances contained in the Old and the New Testament. Among such instances were Abraham's pretense that his wife Sarah was his sister (Gen. 12:11-13);(9) Jacob's deception of his father Isaac in pretending to be the latter's firstborn son Esau (Gen. 27:19); the Egyptian midwives' lie to Pharaoh in order to save the Hebrew children (Exod. 1:17-20); and statements by Jesus in which he misled his disciples, like his pretending on the road to Emmaus that he would go further (Luke 24:28).(10)