Born Liars (23 page)

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 Irish 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
'.

Cardinal Connell felt compelled to emphasise that he did not lie to the media about the use of diocesan funds for the compensation of clerical child sexual abuse victims. According to the report, this is how the Cardinal explained away his misleading statements to the press:

. . . that diocesan funds ARE [report's emphasis] not used for such a purpose; that he had not said that diocesan funds WERE not used for such a purpose. By using the present tense he had not excluded the possibility that diocesan funds had been used for such purpose in the past . . . Cardinal Connell considered that there was an enormous difference between the two.

One can imagine Augustine shaking his head in sorrow and fury at this. The trouble with exceptions, he might say, is that once you allow for any at all, other people get to choose which ones are permissible and why.

* * *

If Augustine wrote the moral rulebook for lying, Immanuel Kant translated it for a secular age – an age in which an idea of a universal human morality took the place of a God-given one, and the rights of the individual became the anchor point for discussions of right and wrong. Kant was the philosophers' Robinson Crusoe, constructing sturdy moral dwellings out of earthly materials, hacking out paths through the ethical jungle of modern life. When it came to lying, Kant essentially agreed with Augustine: it was wrong, always and everywhere, with no exceptions.

The bedrock of Kant's argument was the dignity of the individual. We have to tell the truth to the man who wants to kill our friend because every person – even a murderer – has a right to the truth. (Kant didn't get into the question of whether, if our friend survived, he'd want to be friends with us any more.) Deny someone truth, and you deny their humanity, a quality even the worst of us must be accorded. Not only that, but the liar besmirches his own humanity:

The greatest violation of a human being's duty to himself regarded merely as a moral being (the humanity in his own person) is the contrary of truthfulness, lying . . . For the dishonour that accompanies a lie also accompanies a liar like a shadow. By an external lie a human being makes himself an object of contempt in the eyes of others; by an internal lie he does what is still worse: he makes himself contemptible in his own eyes and violates the dignity in his own person. By a lie a human being throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a human being.

Kant's ideas on lying formed part of his first contribution to moral philosophy,
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
. It was published in 1785, when he was sixty-one. The treatise was well-received by his contemporaries, who regarded Kant with respect verging on awe; he had already established himself as the most important living philosopher. Not everyone accepted the book's arguments, however. In 1796 a young writer in Paris was bold enough to question them in public.

Benjamin Constant was a Swiss-born nobleman, the descendant of Huguenots who had fled France in the sixteenth century to avoid oppression. Born in 1767, he was a man of the world, educated in Germany, France and Scotland, and one of the first self-consciously liberal thinkers, arguing passionately for the rule of law, the rights of man, and the abolition of slavery. He was dash-ing and handsome, a gambler and a womaniser who frequently fought duels with cuckolded husbands and was usually juggling the romantic attentions of more than one lady at a time. The great love of his life, however, was Madame De Staël, the brilliant writer, socialite and
grande dame
of European society. The two pursued a tempestuous, intellectually vibrant affair for ten years. After meeting Constant in Switzerland, Mme De Staël took her young lover to Paris in 1795 and introduced him to salon society. He threw himself into the city's intellectual and political life.

Constant published an article that posed the ‘murderer at the door' question to Kant. For Constant, this was not just a hypothetical question. Paris was still reeling from the Reign of Terror that followed the French Revolution, which saw thousands of men lose their lives on an arbitrary basis. Although the city was peaceful by the time of Constant's arrival, most households were familiar with the fear of a murderer coming to visit; many had been encouraged to give up their friends to those who would harm them. Living in what Professor Stephen Holmes, a biographer of Constant, describes as an ‘hysterical environment', Constant was acutely aware of why a man might lie to protect himself, his family or friends (he may or may not also have been thinking about his rather complicated love life).

For Constant, says Holmes, ‘the idea that one could just pronounce all lying to be immoral seemed absurd'. In Constant's own words, ‘The moral principle stating that it is a duty to tell the truth would make any society impossible if that principle were taken singly and unconditionally.' Constant accepted that sometimes lying is necessary, and he also knew that a man might be put to death on the basis of a lie. But to focus on the morality of lying as if it existed in a vacuum was dangerous. Unsurprisingly, Constant felt strongly that all moral arguments needed to be grounded in reality. He was living in a city that was recovering from a period in which abstract principles were taken to extremes; the result had been a murderous terror. Lying was a fact of life; the real imperative was to strengthen society's
institutions
– the rule of law, parliament – thus ensuring that people weren't thrown into jail or relieved of their heads on the basis of malicious untruths.

Kant replied to Constant in 1797, in an essay called ‘On the Supposed Right to Lie From Philanthropy'. He stuck rigidly to his position, arguing that it is always wrong to lie, even when the murderer is at your door and asking after your friend. Kant was contemptuous of the idea that there should or could be exceptions to the universal moral law of truth-telling. Exceptions are self-defeating: if everybody agrees it's okay to lie to murderers, then murderers won't believe a word anyone says. You've got to hold the line, and preserve the sacredness of truth. Some principles are more important than your friend's life.

* * *

Two hundred years after this debate, Professor Kang Lee became intrigued by Western attitudes to lying. A Canadian citizen, Lee has lived in Toronto for over twenty years, though he was raised in China and retains an outsider's perspective on the mores of his adoptive culture. Lee was struck by the vigour with which people in the West denounced deceit. The media screamed ‘liar' at politicians. Preachers fulminated against deceit from the pulpit. Teachers lectured students and parents warned children against lying. Yet it seemed plain to Lee that every member of those groups, and indeed everyone else, lied as a matter of course, and even endorsed a category of lies known as white lies that seemed to expand and contract according to no obvious logic.
³³
What, he wondered, was at the root of this strange example of collective hypocrisy?