In the remnants of what I have perceived to be a Protestant cultural value, sincerity has often been praised to me as a counterbalance for stupidity. When I have --mirabili dictu-- criticized an idea as wrong, some people --usually women-- have responded, "But he/she is sincere." Being a Five, I am dumbfounded by finding this dumbness.
It relates, sorta, to an apocryphal quote from the 13th century Italian Dominican Thomas Aquinas that "lying is withholding the truth from someone who has the right to know it." Mere speaking of what is not the case is not inherently wrong. Italian situational ethics.
I had assumed that Emmanuel Kant, the archetypal tightassed Protestant German, was the one who created the strange view of judging one's actions in light of their becoming a universal rule so that lying, even to a madman with an ax, would still be wrong. You simply kant tell an untruth.
But it appears that I am wrong. Hadley Arkes --yes, that's his name-- quoted old Emmanuel to an effect very much like old Thomas. Arkes puts it simply: all killing is not murder; murder is unjustified killing,. So all untruthfulness is not lying; lying is unjustified untruthfulness.
5 comments:
Ex cathedra surely praises us Prots too highly to see in us a will to veracity. Nevertheless, the RCC is to be praised for the experiment of trying to redeem the oikoumene by permitting sacerdotal imagery and judicious "truthfulness" while exhorting the permitted to transcend animistic idolatry and routine falsehood.
The Protestant "approach" is to forbid all lying while tacitly validating lies as necessary. Perhaps that is the best course. The RC technicalities are never enough to validate the falsehood necessary for espionage and police work.
(Sectarian bail out: a Christian must never be a spy or a policeman, or any sort of citizen at all — including Mennonite Central Committee fellow travellers, who supported Soviet falsehoods against the lying system of "capitalism." But surely silences that intend to deceive occur in sectarian communes too? »Oh, but we repent of them as sins. We don't try to justify them or excuse them.« Which implies that sectarian Christian communes are a part of the devil's unredeem'd oikoumene: they need intending-to-deceive falsehood in order to function.)
When Winston Churchill enquired of the pope his advice for the war, Pius 12 didn't admonish the British secret service for employing falsehoods, and exhort the prime minister to permit only mental reservation. For example, if a German officer asks, "Hey, I bet you're a spy for the Allies," the spy according to natural law binding upon all persons in the conscience, "must" not reply with any words involving a falsehood, but may reply (intending to deceive, alas) along the lines of "Why would you think that?" or "Me a spy for the British? Are you kidding?" But "mental reservation" isn't sufficient for effective falsification.
P.S. Getting rid of sacerdotal imagery (and not only Elizabeth 1 and Luther and European Lutheran Christianity maintain the crucifix) doesn't defeat idolatry, any more than prohibiting lies achieves truthfulness. What after all is a mentor but a mendor?
Yet one doesn't need to go so far afield in "the" Church as Thomas Aquinas to find the opinion that "lying is withholding the truth from someone who has the right to know it." The new Catechism maintains only that one must not speak so as to lead someone into error (¶¶2483, 2484, 2508); one isn't obligated to speak so as to lead someone out of error into truth; "whether or not it would be appropriate to reveal the truth to someone who asks [for the truth]" is a question that "the golden rule *helps* one discern in con-crete situations" (¶2520).
Ultimately old Luther is right: the only possible serious concern is the justification of sin in the sinner. Maybe Mr Arkes intends an agreement in his thesis that murder is only unjustify'd killing [the half-life in a self], lying is only unjustify'd falsehood, idolatry is only unjustify'd worshipping of idols, adultery is only unjustify'd sex with someone else's spouse, and so on.
"Unjustify'd" sc not yet justify'd.
Accordingly, "sin boldly," a statement of Luther in a letter that RC controversialists quite understandably can't resist using against Luther, just as the Anglicans couldn't resist making sport of Newman when he wrote a defense of RC economy in truthfulness. (Newman was new at the RC side of that game, and the perfidious albion Anglicans were old hands at theirs.)
It's true that "sinning boldly" would shake Christianity to its foundations, and open the possibility for something better from the OT for us Gentiles (cf Nietzsche on Luther's intentions: short-term restore the church to long term deconstruct Gay Science, fifth book). Where's the objection in that.
Luther didn't compel Christians to sin boldly, whereas Nietzsche did compel (anonymous) Christians to sinning on and on boldly as if producing crypto-dualistic wastelands were from strength.
»Do you tremble, word processor? You would tremble a lot more if you knew where I'm leading you.« (revised epigraph to fifth book of Nietzsche's Gay Science)
Don't worry, though, really. The fifth act is a comedy. Gay Science ¶153
Post a Comment