"The Unceasing Social Debt -- Truth"

By Walter Farrell, O.P.

Social debts are debts to one's self. Nowhere is this more clear than in the social debt paid by the virtue of veracity. It would be enough to prove the point if we merely noticed the scorn and distrust given the two-faced individual or the liar as contrasted with the honor and trust that decorates the life of the straight-forward, truthful man. But these are external things. Within his very self the liar find. quickly how badly he has cheated himself by his lies as it becomes more and more difficult for him to be what he is, to face the world as it is, to meet life as it is. A lie, you see, is an easy escape, a pleasant substitute for accomplishment and struggle; once we become familiar with that emergency exit our hand reaches for its knob at every hint of danger or labor. The liar buries himself in a false world as sweetly and gently as a man might smother himself in a feather bed.

Christ gave a succinctly profound account of Himself when He said: "I am the truth." Dominic set high goals for himself and his Order when he adopted that single word for his motto: Veritas, the truth. For truth and reality are not really different. Christ, as God, was indeed and is the Supreme Reality and so the Supreme Truth; Dominic seeking truth was seeking the world of reality and the God of reality. A false world is like a false step; rather than advancing a man, it throws him down with a jar that hammers at every bone in his body and utterly ruins his disposition. In the same way -- not doing what it should do -- a false word lets a man down hard; it tangles up the line of communication from man to man which is so essential to human life. Imagine the turmoil in the petty details of society if bus conductors, ticket agents and traffic policemen answered all questions with artistically fluent lies; indignation would be a timid word for the outburst of the explorer in search of Brooklyn who was deposited in the Bronx. Men simply cannot live together if they can never be sure they are in contact with one another; and it is by word that they reach each other's mind.

At times, this obligation to tell the truth is one of strict justice, as, for instance, in answer to a legitimate question by a legitimate superior. But over and above that strict right, men have a claim in sheer decency, certainly in charity, to be spared deception. However, being truthful is not a matter of pulling the bung from our minds and letting all of our knowledge run out. When a wife asks her husband "How do I look?" she is not seeking a diagnosis; prudence will teach him, eventually at least, to restrict his comments to a few large and fairly obvious objectives. When mere politeness moves you to ask after the health of an acquaintance, you stand aghast as he rattles off a long list of his symptoms; this sort of thing is not necessary for social life. Words should measure up to the concept in our minds as things measure up to the concept in God's mind; then both the things and the words are true. It is not impertinent to notice that not all the concepts of God's mind have been expressed in the world of reality. We must tell the truth, yes, but when, where and how it should be told.

The tremendously impossible stories of Baron Munchausen were certainly not lies. They were so evidently and jokingly false that they could never have been meant to deceive; and formally speaking, a lie is the will to say a false thing. Whether or not others are successfully deceived pertains to the perfection of a lie rather than to its nature as a perversion of the gift of speech. The student who knows his matter backwards and gives it that way to his examiners is not guilty of a lie; the manifest hyperbole of a political orator nominating a "favorite son", or the demure secretary's "Mr. Smith is not in" obviously fool no one. They were not meant to fool anyone; the words have a generally accepted meaning, they are polite forms that even the "favorite son" or the traveling salesman do not fail to understand.

Where the formal will to tell a false thing is present there is always a sin, the sin of lying, never justifiable, never excusable. We can no more excuse a boy for the lie he tells to escape a spanking than we can a man who lies to ruin the character of a rival. The second lie is more serious because it enters the field of justice and takes on the added gravity of an offense to another's rights; but strictly as lies, both are inexcusable. Lies are not sour when they hurt another and sweet when they "do no damage"; they are wrong because they pervert the gift of speech. As a matter of fact they always do damage, social damage, which can never be properly estimated. The life of the party who wrings a laugh from a sullen crowd by his plausible lies is none the less a liar albeit an agreeable one. There are not white lies, not even spotted lies; all lies are black with the blackness of sin.

If a girl looking for work as a stenographer is asked whether she has had experience and answers "yes," mentally concluding the sentence, "in washing dishes", she has completely fooled her prospective employer -- for the moment at least. But she might as well have saved herself the effort of mentally re-washing the dishes. She has indulged in a mental restriction which the theologians call "pure", though an odd kind of purity it is, for it leaves the lie intact. There is absolutely no way in which that restriction can be detected by any one else; no way in which the concept in her mind can be seen from her words. It has been just a plain lie. The legitimate mental restriction, a restriction in the wide sense, is found in the poor, worn-out phrase, "Mr. Smith is not in;" only a moron could mistake the meaning. And such a restriction may, under some circumstances, be allowed. So also may ambiguity or equivocation, for we are not obliged to tell all that we know all the time; here we are not telling falsehood, but rather we refrain from improperly telling the truth.

Perhaps the best estimate of the value of truth is to be found in the effect truth has upon man. Devotion to falsehood produces the social outcast and the sinner. Devotion to truth in the intellectual world produces a philosopher; in the social world, it produces a gentleman; in the supernatural world, it produces a saint. In language dear to our times we might say that a lie is a kind of verbal perversion that prevents the conception of knowledge in the minds of our neighbors and thwarts the delivery of our own concepts; it is at the same time a verbal birth control and a verbal abortion.

-- From A Companion to the Summa, Volume III, Chapter XII

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