‘The Snakish Cunning of the Saints’: A Dialogue on Lying, Deception and Equivocation

Extract

‘St.Athanasius was rowing on a river when the persecutors came rowing in the opposite direction: “Where is the traitor Athanasius?” “Not far away,” the Saint gaily replied, and rowed past them unsuspected. St. Joan of Arc... used to put a cross on her letters to her commanders to show that the sentences bore the opposite of the usual French meaning. . . .She was accused of lying, but surely she had a good defence; words get their meaning by convention, and her commanders, to whom the letters were addressed, knew the convention and were not misled; if English soldiers, who had no business to read her letters or to be in her country at all, read them and were misled, that was not her affair. Such is the snakish cunning of the saints . . .’ (Peter Geach, The Virtues, p.114-115)

Philip’s parents had gone out for the evening, and I had been given the job of keeping him amused. About twenty past eight he evidently had a better idea about how to amuse himself than homework, and said he was going out to see a video at a neighbour’s house. I wouldn’t have been dubious about this—if he hadn’t looked so shifty. ‘How long will you be?’ I asked. ‘Hour and a half,’ he replied. ‘So you’d be back ten minutes before your parents?’ ‘Er, yes,’ he grinned. ‘Would your parents let you go?’ Philip looked even shiftier.