Lecture, Dr. John Nieto: “Lying with Tom Aquinas & Huckleberry Finn”

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by Dr. John Francis Nieto
Tutor
Thomas Aquinas College, California
St. Vincent de Paul Lecture & Concert Series,
January 19, 2024

 

In this lecture I will discuss two closely related moral questions pertaining to the virtue of honesty: the lie told to prevent some sin or crime and the act of hiding the truth. In the title of this lecture, I call such lies “stretchers”; that may be a stretch. But the statement that hides the truth is certainly a “blind”. In speaking we use blinds to hide something from someone; we sometimes use stretchers when we are in a tight place. I will talk mostly about stretchers and lies and then say a little about blinds.

I should make clear that I am concerned with a particular virtue, one Aristotle and Saint Thomas do not have a distinct name for, the virtue English calls “honesty”. But I will be talking about this virtue at two levels, the natural and the supernatural, though I will not always distinguish which is principally in mind. At the same time, the substance of the lecture does not have much bearing upon the merely natural life. There is probably not much reason even to point out that every lie is a sin (in some sense of the equivocal name “sin”) unless someone is concerned with Christian perfection. I suspect that no one would consider much—perhaps most—of the acts we call venial sins in any way wrong, if he were not measuring right and wrong by Christian perfection. Even then, many faults and imperfections might demand more attention than the sort of lie I will discuss tonight. But those of us seeking to cultivate the life of the intellect, of which speech is the immediate instrument, and to do this for the glory of God must at least understand the proper principles in our use of that instrument.

Before I turn to the substance of the lecture, I want to emphasize what I have just said about the sinfulness of the lies I am speaking about here. No one is a liar or a bad man because he tells lies to prevent moral or bodily harm to himself or another. As Saint Augustine says, “One should not deny that men who only lie for a man’s safety have progressed much toward the good.”^[1] These lies do not corrupt any virtue nor can they make someone a bad man. And someone who tells these lies is not a liar. They may be parts of a moral act that is otherwise commendable, for which the one who does them deserves praise, perhaps a medal, perhaps merit before God. At the same time these lies do impede us in our efforts to grow in virtue, at least in the virtue of honesty. Most important, they exclude some perfection that God wants to communicate to us through his incarnate Word. I will turn now to the substance of the lecture.

I will begin with some lies told by the hero of Mark Twain’s novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.^[2]The lies occur at the center of a distinct adventure. Huck is with Jim, a runaway slave—who is, or course, black. They are drifting down the Mississippi River. Jim is on a raft, perhaps in the wigwam they have built on the raft, while Huck is in a canoe. In presenting these lies, I am assuming as the novel clearly does that to return Jim to slavery would be wrong and unjust. The passage reads:

Right then, along comes a skiff with two men in it, with guns, and they stopped and I stopped. One of them says:

“What’s that, yonder?”

“A piece of raft,” I says.

“Do you belong on it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any men on it?”

“Only one, sir.”

“Well, there’s five niggers run off to-night, up yonder above the head of the bend. Is your man white or black?”

I didn’t answer up prompt. I tried to, but the words wouldn’t come….I see I was weakening; so I just give up trying, and up and says—

“He’s white.”

“I reckon we’ll go and see for ourselves.” [125-126]

Here Huck says that Jim is white for a good purpose, to keep Jim from being taken back into slavery. And this is the sort of example regularly marched out to defend the use of this sort of lie. In my judgment, there is no reason to think so simple a lie is very useful, unlike those Huck goes on to tell. These marvels of invention are wonderfully clever and deserve a rhetorical analysis I cannot give here. Use of this sort of lie is, parenthetically, the backbone of this novel’s charm. The men intend to see the man on the raft, and Huck encourages them to do so:

“I wish you would,” says I, “because it’s pap that’s there, and maybe you’d help me tow the raft ashore where the light is. He’s sick—and so is mam and Mary Ann.”

“Oh, the devil! we’re in a hurry, boy. But I s’pose we’ve got to. Come—buckle to your paddle, and let’s get along.”

I buckled to my paddle and they laid to their oars. When we had made a stroke or two, I says:

“Pap’ll be might much obleeged to you, I can tell you. Everybody goes away when I want them to help me tow the raft ashore, and I can’t do it by myself.”

“Well, that’s infernal mean. Odd, too. Say, boy, what’s the matter with your father?”

“It’s the—a—the—well, it ain’t anything, much.”

They stopped pulling. It warn’t but a mighty little ways to the raft, now. One says: 

“Boy, that’s a lie. What is the matter with your pap? Answer up square, now, and it’ll be the better for you.”

“I will, sir, I will, honest—but don’t leave us, please. It’s the—the—gentlemen, if you’ll only pull ahead, and let me heave you the head-line, you won’t have to come a-near the raft—please do.”

“Set her back, John, set her back!” says one. They backed water. “Keep away, boy—keep to looard. Confound it, I just expect the wind has blowed it to us. Your pap’s got the small-pox, and you know it precious well. Why didn’t you come out and say so? Do you want to spread it all over?” 

“Well,” says I, a-blubbering, “I’ve told everybody before, and then they just went away and left us.” [126-127]

With these “white” lies Huck saves Jim from being taken back into slavery—a slavery the novel assumes is unjust and founded on much greater lies than those Huck tells.[3]

I will only add here these men send Huck to a town twenty miles down-river with what Mark Twain certainly considers good advice: “you tell them your folks are all down with chills and fever. Don’t be a fool again, and let people guess what is the matter.” [127]

Clearly, this man to whom Huck told a lie to protect a runaway slave is advising Huck to tell a lie to help what he believes to be Huck’s “folks”. I will not here distinguish between preventing evil and bringing some good about. What matters is that a man who would almost certainly be angry that someone used a lie to help a runaway slave escape thinks it morally acceptable to tell a lie to get help for one’s family. This disagreement about just what good one can tell a lie to obtain is important, but more important is the agreement of Huck and this man that sometimes it is right to tell a lie. The sort of lie I am talking about here has the Latin name mendacium officiosum. I think the usual translation, “officious lie”, hovers between Latin and English. By calling this kind of  a lie a “dutiful lie”, a lie told from some duty to prevent evil or promote the good, I hope to bring it all the way into English. 

Saint Thomas teaches that the dutiful lie is a sin, although a venial sin. I will discuss his evaluation by presenting the argument he offers in defense of such a lie and then his resolution of that defense. The defense Saint Thomas offers arises in what we call an “objection”. Those unfamiliar with the form employed in most of Saint Thomas’ writings should note that he offers arguments on both sides of a question before he proposes his own judgment. This objection, therefore, is not his own judgment but an opinion which he intends to solve by showing where it errs. Also note that in giving this argument, Saint Thomas is not lying because he is speaking in persona, as if he were the person holding this position; the writing structure makes that clear. The objection reads,

Furthermore, one ought to choose what is less evil to avoid a greater evil, just as a doctor cuts off a limb lest it corrupt the whole body. But that someone should generate a false opinion in another’s soul is less harm than that someone should kill or be killed. So a man can licitly lie that he might preserve one man from homicide and preserve another from death.^[4]

I take this as more or less the position of Mark Twain, expressed in Huck Finn and an essay “On the Decay of the Art of Lying”. At present let me point out two things about this argument Saint Thomas gives us. First, he does not merely suggest that the dutiful lie is licit to preserve someone from suffering harm. He thinks the argument also applies to the effort to keep someone from doing harm, from sinning. Second, the argument proceeds merely from the quantity of harm or evil involved in the act.  

Saint Thomas offers a resolution of his defense of the dutiful lie by making a distinction. This occurs in his reply to the objection just mentioned. The reply reads as follows: 

…a lie not only has the definition of sin from the harm which it does to [one’s] neighbor but from its own disorder [inordinatione], as has been said. But it is not licit to use any illicit disorder to impede harms and defects of others, just as it is not licit to steal so that a man can give alms…. And, therefore, it is not licit to tell a lie for this purpose that someone might free another from any danger whatsoever. Yet it is licit to prudently hide the truth under some dissimulation, as Augustine says in Against the Lie.^[5]

I will return later to the act of hiding the truth, what I have called a “blind”. At present, note that Saint Thomas does not teach here that deceiving the one who wills to commit some crime is the reason this dutiful lie is a sin. I do not deny that we cannot licitly will to deceive anyone, but still this is not the immediate concern of Saint Thomas here. Rather, he speaks of the inordinatio or disorder involved in the act and he makes the claim that one can never licitly use any illicit disorder for a good purpose. 

I want to focus on this disorder in two ways. First, I will do so by comparison with the disorder in homicide. In another work, Saint Thomas argues that “homicide sometimes happens licitly…So a lie [can] also [happen licitly].”^[6]When he responds to this defense, Saint Thomas analyzes the acts mentioned. He begins by pointing out that homicide is in fact always a sin. He says,

…homicide too is always a sin, because it has an inseparable disorder annexed [to it]; for homicide means [important] more than the killing of a man… homicide means the undue killing of a man. And therefore, homicide is never licit, although to kill a man is sometimes licit.^[7]

How Saint Thomas distinguishes the disordered killing of a man from an ordered one is irrelevant here. What matters is this, that insofar as the names “murder” or “homicide” and “lie” signify something inseparable from disorder, we can never licitly perform either act. 

The disorder involved in homicide and lying is the reason we cannot perform such acts. The magnitude of evil is not the reason Saint Thomas gives. Yet he is not saying that to lie is in itself equal in harm to murder. He is merely stating that lying involves a disorder inseparable from the act. 

I suggest the following comparisons. We sometimes cause someone embarrassment and shame by charitably pointing out his faults; other times we do this from spite or cruelty. Clearly, this distinction has nothing to do with the amount of pain that someone might feel as the object of either act. The amount of shame and embarrassment is not the reason taunting someone is wrong. The intrinsic disorder of the act is the reason. Again, in war men licitly kill other men, yet the least feeling of personal hatred toward the enemy introduces a disorder that constitutes some kind of sin, at least venial.

I turn now to focus directly on the nature of the disorder that Saint Thomas considers inseparable from lying. Saint Thomas explains this disorder by referring to a passage from Aristotle’s On Interpretation. He says,

A lie is bad from its genus. For it is an act falling upon undue [indebitam] matter; for since vocal sounds [voces] are signs of thoughts by nature [naturaliter], it is unnatural and undue that someone signify with a vocal sound [voce] what he does not hold in [his] mind. Whence the Philosopher says in Nicomachean Ethics 4 that the lie is in itself bad and to be avoided,^[8]while the true is good and laudable. Whence every lie is a sin, as Augustine too asserts in his book Against the Lie.^[9]
In another place where he offers a similar argument, he concludes with this judgment, “Whence every lie is a sin, however much someone lies for the sake of some good.”^[10]

This disorder occurs in the act of bringing a statement forth as a vocal sign—the one who lies does not bring forth the statement for its natural end. Note here, by the way, that speech does not have a nature as if it exists altogether in its own right. The nature of speech is nothing other than a certain instrument of human nature; speech is a certain expression of human nature. The lie offends human nature.

Some who defend the use of falsehood or lies in moral action rightly point out that speech has many uses other than expression of the truth. We often use speech to express how we feel toward others or to entertain. In fact, as Aristotle points out in On Interpretation, some forms of speech do not have truth and falsehood. He mentions prayer and implies what we call fiction or stories. I would add questions, which are never true or false, whatever they might imply. These forms of speech have other purposes than expression of truth or falsehood and many statements that are true or false also have other purposes.

But where these thinkers fail is in thinking that any principle of moral action can achieve further—sometimes even higher—purposes if it fails to achieve its first and definitive purpose. So punishment has many purposes: deterrence, rehabilitation, protection of the community. But the one who punishes does not justly attain any of these, if the first and immediate purpose of punishment is missing: that the offender pay some penalty for his crime. Again, music and literature have a great power to train and educate our passions. But they cannot do so unless they move those passions in a pleasing manner, which is their first and definitive purpose.

I propose that the reason many, perhaps most, of those who are good and virtuous—including many Christians—find it difficult to believe that lies are always wrong is because no passion is immediately involved in the utterance of speech. We speak by an act of the will and not through passions. For this reason, our passions toward lies arise principally because of their matter or their end. So, Huck quickly calls the two men that enter into his adventures “those frauds”; he describes the dissimulation they use in robbing the orphans of their inheritance as “disgusting” [212] and, when they pretend to mourn their dead brother, he says it was “enough to make a body ashamed of the human race” [210]. When we consider lies told from our duty to fight such evils, our passions arise and rightly arise against those evils and against those who attempt to perpetrate them and thus accidentally in favor of the lies. I suspect the comparison of these passions to our feelings toward the dutiful lie itself leads some to think the dutiful lie is not a moral evil but only the sort of deprivation that we call a “natural evil”.

My judgment that most people wrongly judge the dutiful lie and that they do so because they judge such acts through their passions should not suggest to anyone that I think the passions I have mentioned are wrong or that passions are merely accidental to our moral life. The love of telling the truth that defines honesty is not something distinct from the love of neighbor and the love of human nature that is definitive of the moral life universally. Yet the correct passions toward lies arise more immediately from our love of those with whom we speak—including ourselves—and from our love of our common human nature than do our passions toward other moral defects; perhaps this is because the intellect is more the man than other aspects of human nature. I will look at the disorder involved in lying more closely through an observation made by Saint Thomas and then through passages from Huck Finn. Finally, I will address the question through another kind of attention.

The love that honest men feel for the truth becomes clearer another way. Saint Thomas recognizes that, if there is no intention of saying something false, the statement “does not have the complete notion of a lie”^[11] and thus the speaker is not lying. Yet he still sees some opposition to honesty even in accidentally saying something false. This will surprise anyone whose honesty is not very strong. He says: 

That someone should say something true, while intending to say what is false is more opposed to [honesty] than if he should say something false intending to say something true.[12]

Here Saint Thomas is comparing two men. One intends to lie and accidentally states the truth. The other intends to tell the truth and accidentally says something false. In saying that one of these acts is more opposed to honesty, he implies that both are in some way opposed to honesty.

I want to focus here on the act less opposed to honesty. Intending to say something true while actually saying something false, is, according to Saint Thomas, in some way opposed to honesty, because what is uttered is the matter proper to the act of lying. He says this despite his recognition that there is no moral fault here, no defect in the will. I feel sure he does not think we should feel any guilt about such an act or confess to a priest that we have done so.

Still, this fact, that merely uttering something false against his intention is opposed to someone’s honesty, manifests the integrity of the honest man’s love of the truth. This focuses our attention on what is most essential to this virtue. The honest man, through this virtue, desires to tell the truth, not only out of concern for his moral state or his culpability but principally from his love for the truth itself as it exists in speech, and this is not something abstracted from his love of himself and of other men and women. He loves the speaking the truth as a certain perfection of human nature.

The more a man is honest, as anyone can see, the more he will take care to consider what he says, lest he express something false while believing it to be true. The discovery that he has said something false, even though he believes the statement true, is painful to such a man. No doubt Saint Thomas felt some pain at a few errors he made in his earliest writings and corrected in the later ones. This pain is not precisely the pain of guilt. He feels pain at having formed a false statement somewhat as a singer feels pain at having sung a “false” note. 

Central to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is Huck’s moral growth. This moral development even distinguishes Huck Finn from Tom Sawyer. Huck has begun to grow up, while Tom is still the same boy he was at the beginning. In no small measure, Huck’s moral growth involves a growth in honesty. I will take a few glances at one development in this growth and then focus on another.

Huck’s principal development in the love of honesty occurs while he is caught up in the endeavor of two con men called the king and the duke to defraud of their inheritance three young women recently orphaned by pretending to be their English uncles. Huck expresses his contempt for their actions at various points in the narrative, but he does not dare to expose them for fear of their exposing Jim as a runaway slave. In Huck’s conversation in chapter twenty-six with Joanna, the youngest of the three girls, Huck makes up a number of lies, more and more outlandish, about life in England. (I should state here that I find little in the whole novel as entertaining as Huck’s conversations with Joanna, usually called the hare-lip.) As he reports, “when I got done, I see she warn’t satisfied.” 

She asks him, “[H]ain’t you been telling me a lot of lies?” Huck denies that he has and even insists, “Not a lie in it.” She proposes that he lay his hand “on this book” and say so. Huck says, “I see it warn’t nothing but a dictionary,” and makes clear that he felt some compunction about swearing on the Bible. He felt no such compunction about repeating his claim that there was “not a lie in it” on a dictionary. She responds, “Well, then, I’ll believe some of it; but I hope to gracious if I’ll believe the rest.”

At this point Joanna’s two sisters enter, and the eldest, Mary Jane, asks Joanna what she refuses to believe. Even before Joanna responds, Mary Jane insists that it is not “right nor kind” for Joanna not to believe Huck, especially given that he is “a stranger and so far from his people.” Joanna defends herself, reasonably enough, by asserting that “He’s told some stretchers, I reckon; and I said I wouldn’t swallow it all.” 

Mary Jane’s response is a lesson in the good man’s obligation to treat others as honest people, especially when he is a host:

“I don’t care whether ‘twas little or whether ‘twas big, he’s here in our house and a stranger, and it wasn’t good of you to say it. If you was in his place it would make you feel ashamed; and so you oughtn’t to say a thing to another person that will make them feel ashamed.” 

Joanna’s objects, “Why…he said—”; Mary Jane interrupts,

“It don’t make no difference what he said—that ain’t the thing. The thing is for you to treat him kind, and not be saying things to make him remember he ain’t in his own country and amongst his own folks.”

This leads Huck to feel shame that he is cooperating with “that old reptile” (the king) to rob Mary Jane. The other sister, Susan, also reprimands Joanna, and Huck also feels shame that he is part of a scheme that will rob her.

Mary Jane then “took another inning” at reproving Joanna but, as Huck notes, she did this “sweet and lovely…which was always her way”. Once Joanna relents, her two sisters demand that she ask Huck’s pardon. As Huck reports, “She done it, too. And she done it beautiful. She done it so beautiful it was good to hear; and I wished I could tell her a thousand lies, so she could do it again.” This leads him to feel yet more shame: “this is another one that I’m letting him rob her of her money.” 

While the story involves many more important elements of virtue, I merely want to focus on one. Huck feels a joy that Joanna apologized for saying she did not believe him. He emphasizes this by saying he wished he could tell many more lies so “she could do it again”, that is, so she could affirm her trust in him. Huck adds, “And when she got through, they all jest laid theirselves out to make me feel at home and know I was amongst friends.” He then wants to be honest—including much more than telling the truth—as a response to their trust.

But another experience makes Huck reconsider his attitude toward lying at a more fundamental level. Two chapters later, Huck comes upon the eldest sister, Mary Jane, weeping over the separation of mother and children in the sale of the household slaves by her “uncles”. “‘To think,’ she says, ‘they ain’t ever going to see each other any more!’”  To comfort her, Huck blurts out the truth, that he knows they will be together again and within two weeks (when the illegality of the sale has become clear). As Huck says, “Laws, it was out before I could think!”

Mary Jane begs him to repeat his statement and Huck then reports his thoughts before he goes on to reveal the fraud being practiced against her and her sisters. The passage deserves quotation at length:

I see I had spoke too sudden, and said too much, and was in a close place. I asked her to let me think, a minute, and she set there, very impatient and excited and handsome, but looking kind of happy and eased-up, like a person that’s had a tooth pulled out. So I went to studying it out. I says to myself, I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight place, is taking considerable many resks, though I ain’t had no experience, and can’t say for certain; but it looks so to me, anyway; and yet here’s a case where I’m blest if it don’t look to me like the truth is better, and actually safer, than a lie. I must lay it by in my mind, and think it over some time or other, it’s so kind of strange and unregular. I never see nothing like it. Well, I says to myself, at last, I’m agoing to chance it; I’ll up and tell the truth this time, though it does seem most like setting down on a kag of powder and touching it off, just to see where you’ll go to.

This reconsideration of the role of truth in human interaction comes about from Huck’s love and esteem for Mary Jane and her sisters. With them, he first encounters a world in which honesty and the truth are principles of common life. 

No one should feel surprise if, like Huck, many people find the lie very useful in many situations. Such people have rarely, perhaps never, found themselves in a moral world in which it seems safer to tell the truth. They come to believe—with some degree of responsibility—that expediency and self-interest really are the proper principles of moral action. Many hold this worldly view of morality despite recognizing now and then that it seems that things should be otherwise.

In fact, some Catholics who defend dutiful lies argue they are licit because of the fall of man. They rightly point out that we now need to use speech to defend ourselves and those we love from others who would do us harm; sometimes we have an obligation to defend ourselves somehow. They think these needs make it licit to use falsehood rather than truth as means to these ends. 

I will begin to take up my last perspective on this sort of lie by pointing out three things I have no time to examine in detail. First, as many who defend using falsehood or lies in such straits recognize, we cannot use moral evil to bring about good, even if we sometimes excuse such moral evils. Second, not every moral predicament has a just means of escape. In fact, the just man does not have as many instruments of action to achieve his good ends as the unjust man has to achieve his evil ends. Third, if we attempt to fight our fallen nature and its effects with the lie, we are employing the very instrument of the fall, the lie we learned there from the serpent. How can Satan cast out Satan? 

As my last look at the dutiful lie, I want to propose a likeness in Huck’s experience with the three Wilks girls to Christian life. Huck realized that the lie is somehow appropriate to the world of “rapscallions” and inappropriate to a community founded on love and trust. So we must realize that the lie is a principle of human action introduced by man’s fall and an instrument proper to fallen men as such. If someone uses the dutiful lie to avoid harm, especially great harm, I have no desire to reprimand him. But this is not the world we live in as Christians. This is not to say we live in a world that is safe and involves no harm or danger. Huck suggested the truth might be safer; he did not imagine there is nothing dangerous about the truth. 

To consider the moral world we really live in more clearly, I will look at the role of truth in Christ’s passion. I am assuming here that all Christian action proceeds by union with and by participation in Christ’s passion. This discussion will also prepare incidentally for consideration of the act of hiding the truth, setting up blinds.

In particular, I want to ask why Christ did not use a dutiful lie during his passion. If telling a dutiful lie is admissible or even obligatory to prevent crimes and sins, we should ask ourselves whether Christ could have or should have used a dutiful lie. We believe he did not and I suspect almost everyone here could suggest many reasons why he did not. By looking at these opportunities for such a lie in his passion, I will focus on one reason: Christ intended to save us through the truth and the lie could not help him do so.

First, in Gethsemane, when he asked the crowd that came out to arrest him, “Whom are you seeking?” they tell him, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Jesus does not lie. He clearly does this so that the crowd will not trouble the disciples who are with him. But Saint John’s gospel also makes clear that he says “I am” as a theophany, a manifestation of his divinity. It echoes the “I am who am” God spoke to Moses from the burning bush.[13] This theophany is the expression of who Jesus is. Jesus reveals himself in Gethsemane, as he is about to free us from sin, as the same God who led the Hebrews out of Egypt. 

Then, in his trial before Caiaphas, Matthew makes clear that Jesus spoke when Caiaphas said, “I charge you by the living God that you tell us whether you are the Christ, the son of God.” I assume that Jesus understood these words as a legal demand for an answer from the legitimate high priest of the Jewish religion. This, of course, is enough to prevent a dutiful lie, even if such lies are licit. So, from justice Jesus spoke the truth although it led to his own death or to many grave sins committed against him. Still, he spoke the truth with some care. To make clear that he was not boasting or forcing someone else to publicly acknowledge his mission, he told Caiaphas, “You have said it.”

Finally, before Pilate too, Jesus was silent for the most part.  I assume that this silence expresses the fact that Jesus did not recognize the authority of Pilate. John’s gospel, however, reports a conversation between Pilate and Jesus. I will not look at it in detail; I will merely highlight two elements of this interrogation. First, as with Caiaphas, Jesus does not speak to Pilate defiantly. He asks him, “Are you saying this of yourself or have others told you about me?” Just as Pilate is attempting to free Jesus, so Jesus is attempting to keep Pilate from greater responsibility in this action. Second, Jesus does not insist upon his kingship, to the extent Pilate cannot understand it. He does all but deny that he is a king. Finally, when Pilate recognizes that Jesus has implicitly affirmed that he is a king, Jesus clarifies the nature of his kingdom by saying, “For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. For everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.” [Jn 18.37] Jesus came into the world to save us by testifying to the truth; how could a lie help him do so?

Jesus had the most perfect knowledge of the good and evil that would result from his actions and this evil even includes greater suffering for eternity by rejection of the truth by which he saves us from damnation. He has the greatest love for all mankind and he did every action from a love for every one of us. When speaking to Caiaphas and Pilate, he speaks from love of them and from love of each one of us. But he cannot speak a lie before them, because the lie cannot save anyone from sin and misery. Only the truth can do so. Only the Word of God, eternally expressing the truth subsisting in his Father, can save us. And he saves us by becoming man to testify to this truth: that the truth can save us.

 Yet Christ was silent during much of his passion, and he expressed some of the truths he told in his passion with only an indirect opposition to those he speaks to. Broadly speaking, silence is a way to hide the truth. And, while indirect expression of a truth is not the act of hiding that truth in the strictest sense, it expresses the same love for the truth as an instrument in human action that motivates the act of hiding the truth.

Saint Thomas says, “…it is licit to hide the truth prudently under some dissimulation.”[14] We cannot, however, hide the truth in every human action. Sometimes we are obliged to speak by one sort of law or another. This is among the first things we teach a child, that he must answer his parents’ questions but not those of a stranger. When we are obliged to speak, we must not remain silent; then we are not free to say nothing or to refuse to answer a question. Prudence, or some participation in prudence, is the virtue by which we recognize such an obligation.

A good example of hiding the truth occurs in the Acts of the Apostles. Saint Paul was brought before a council composed of Pharisees and Sadducees because he is preaching Christ:

Then Paul, knowing that one part of them was Sadducees and the other Pharisees, cried out aloud in the council: Men and brothers, I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee. I am being tried for my hope in the resurrection of the dead. When he said this, there was strife between the Pharisees and Sadducees and the assembly was split. For the Sadducees say there is no resurrection, and neither angel nor spirit, and the Pharisees believe in both of these.^[15]

Here Saint Paul hides or conceals one truth by telling another. He hides the truth that he is being tried for his belief in Christ’s resurrection by announcing that he is being tried for his hope for the general resurrection of which the resurrection of Christ is the first principle and cause.

When there is no obligation in positive or natural law, the virtuous man has no obligation to express any truth requested of him. Some virtues, such as justice, humility or friendliness, may urge the virtuous to be silent. Likewise, many circumstances may suggest that silence is prudent: time, place, the interrogator, and so on. When—and only when, so far as I can see—a man can legitimately remain silent, he may also choose to hide the truth, that is, to speak in such a manner that conceals some truth that is of interest to the other party. I note here that I presently use the phrase “hide the truth” to speak of an act of speaking rather than silence. 

In concrete circumstances these two actions—refusing to express some truth and hiding that truth—blend into one another. Clearly, we sometimes refuse to speak, not by actual silence, but by saying something: “I’m not free to discuss that,” or “That’s no concern of yours.” Again, someone may change the subject, and this can be done in two ways that can be quite distinct. One might do so pointedly, looking the other in the eyes and ask, “Are you expecting this weather to last?” as a clear though implicit refusal to answer. One might also bring something up hurriedly (“I’ve been meaning to ask you…”) as a distraction from some uncomfortable subject. 

In this last case, the speaker may well speak so close to the original subject that someone hearing believes that he has in fact spoken about the matter of interest. For example, asked about something, he state some truth that suggests he does not know: “I would hate to think a friend of mine did something like that.” The very fact of stating “I was just thinking of asking you the same question,” necessitates the truth of this very statement. 

When and to the extent the speaker himself recognizes the possibility that someone listening will think he has addressed the matter of interest, he is hiding the truth in the strictest sense. So far as I can see, hiding the truth always has some share in “discreetly” changing the subject. One hides the truth to the extent that the change is not apparent. By making the change obvious, one implicitly refuses to speak to the subject.

In some sense, hiding the truth as an act distinct from refusing to speak to the question at hand lies “between” the two extremes of silence and a contemptuous refusal to respond. The one hiding the truth intends not to speak to the point without calling attention to this fact. He considers the question or comment in some way uncalled-for without expressing this. So far as I can see, in a virtuous character, hiding the truth is difficult to understand unless the speaker finds himself situated in some way between these two extremes. 

Because hiding the truth is to express one truth in order to avoid manifesting another, almost anyone who hides the truth gives occasion to believe he speaks precisely to the matter of interest. Usually the truth used to hide is relevant to the truth hidden. Anyone intending to hide the truth knows that the speaker may take that occasion and form a false opinion. He recognizes to himself, “I do not wish to address this matter, nor do I want to call attention to the fact that I am not addressing this matter.”[16] For this reason, hiding the truth has an intrinsic danger. Often one who hides some truth hopes the one hearing him will conclude something he has not said, something false. Yet he cannot rejoice in his power to bring this about as if bringing this conclusion to the hearer’s mind were his proper intention. Should he distinctly intend to form the false opinion, his speech would have deception as its purpose and would differ from a lie only accidentally. 

Many find it difficult to make this distinction. But, as Saint Thomas teaches, sometimes someone is deceived because another proposes something false to him, and sometimes someone is deceived because that other does not open his mind to him.[17] In the second case, the speaker need not intend that someone listening forms a false opinion. He may well hope that the speaker “jumps to the wrong conclusion”. Still, this is not the proper effect of the evidence offered. He is not a proper cause that the other forms a false opinion. He only intends to hide the truth.

This seems absurd to some. A speaker cannot, they claim, say something he considers likely to have as its effect a false opinion in another without intending that other to form such a false opinion. I do not think it absurd, although I recognize that without perfect honesty, it is very difficult. For those who judge moral action by what is possible to men of middling virtue, the difficult and the impossible are more or less the same.

The case can be clarified by a similar one: the attempt of a private citizen to keep off an attacker. The defender may use force and even deadly force.[18] He may know that his shot will kill the assailant, if this is the only way to repel attack. But he cannot want to kill from anger or vengeance; he cannot intend to kill the attacker. Sometimes the man who kills in self-defense says with great sincerity that he did not want to kill the attacker, that he begged him to leave, and so on.[19]

In hiding the truth, the speaker whose honesty is still weak may in certain circumstances feel a direct inclination to form a false opinion in the hearer’s mind. This may be merely defensive: he hopes to protect himself or someone close to him from some evil. Again, this may arise from some hatred or contempt—perhaps a just hatred or contempt—toward the person to whom he speaks. Here the desire to “dupe” this character arises alongside the just desire to hide the truth. Yet again, attention to his own cleverness may lead the speaker to feel some vainglory in his ability to fool someone. Huck expresses such vainglory, when he refers back to his building a fire to hide his departure from Jackson’s Island: “Anyways, they stayed away from us, and if my building the fire never fooled them, it warn’t no fault of mine. I played it as low-down on them as I could.” [Ch. 12] In my judgment, so long as such intentions remain secondary, they make the act of hiding the truth imperfect but do not make it a lie, and therefore a sin.

These are acts in which we must be cunning as the serpent yet innocent as the dove. What we admire about Huck Finn is his use of cunning for innocent purposes. This makes him the exemplar of natural virtue in American literature almost as Socrates is the exemplar of acquired virtue in Greek literature. Huck is even more cunning than the con men and can con from them what they have conned from others and he does this without becoming jaded or wicked. If he is imperfect and tells some stretchers here and there, we can forgive him. But we forgive him—as we would not forgive the two con men, the king and the duke—within a natural, temporal order which must put up with and allow many evils merely to maintain a human world in which the good can flourish. 

But we also and especially live in a world that Christ has transformed by uniting us in and through his passion to the very first truth in all of reality, the trinity of persons in God. By our faith in this truth and in his incarnation, Christ is now transforming the world in and through our own moral actions. But, as we see in the passion, Christ himself is unable to lie to Caiaphas or Pilate—characters not so different from Huck’s king and duke— to bring about his ends. If he cannot lie and our Christian action proceeds from the truth in him, why should we imagine that we can?

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