From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The doctrine of mental reservation, or the doctrine of mental equivocation, was a special branch of casuistry developed in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and most often associated with the Jesuits and their resistance against the Protestant Reformation.

The doctrine of mentalis restrictio or mental reservation was most fully enunciated by the late-16th-century religious writer Dr. Martin de Azpilcueta, known as Dr. Navarrus after his home country. Navarrus held that mental reservation involved truths "expressed partly in speech and partly in the mind," relying upon the idea that God hears what is in one's mind while human beings hear only what one speaks. Therefore the Christian's moral duty was to tell the truth to God. Reserving some of that truth from the ears of human hearers was moral if it served a greater good. The user of the doctrine could reply "I know not" aloud to a human interlocutor, and "to tell you" silently to God, and still be telling the truth.

The doctrine of mental reservation was intimately linked with the concept of equivocation, which allowed the speaker to employ double meanings of words to tell the literal truth while concealing a deeper meaning. Navarrus did not by any means originate these ideas, but he gave them a far more broad and liberal interpretation than had anyone up to that time. Other Catholic theological thinkers and writers took up the argument in favor of equivocation and mental reservation. Though the concepts remained controversial within the Roman Catholic Church (which never officially endorsed or upheld the doctrines), the Jesuits came to favor these tactics for their obvious advantages.

The linked doctrines of mental reservation and equivocation became notorious in England during the Elizabethan era and the Jacobean era, when Jesuit agents penetrating England to maintain the Catholic cause were captured by the authorities, and used these concepts in their legal defenses. Robert Southwell (ca. 1561–1595), a Jesuit priest and agent (also a poet of note) who was arrested in England in 1592, defended the doctrines at his trial, to the predictable resistance of the authorities. (Southwell was convicted, and executed in 1595.) More famous in his own era was Henry Garnet (1555–1606), who wrote a defense of Southwell in 1598; Garnet was captured by the authorities in 1606 due to his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot. He used the same doctrines in his own defense, with the same result as Southwell: Garnet was executed that year.

The Protestants considered these doctrines as mere justifications for lies. Catholic ethicists also voiced objections: "Blaise Pascal...attacked the Jesuits in the seventeenth century for what he saw as their moral laxity."^[1] "By 1679, the doctrine of mental reservation had become such a scandal that Pope Innocent XI officially condemned it."^[2]

And the doctrines have generally not stood up to the critical examination of ethicists, philosophers, and legal scholars^[3]—though larger and more complex moral and ethical issues of lying and truth-telling extend far beyond these specific doctrines.

1. ^ Randal, p. 151.
2. ^ Brown, p. 41.
3. ^ Bok, pp. 35-7 and ff.

• Bok, Sissela. Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life. New York, Vintage, 1978.
• Brown, Meg Lota. Donne and the Politics of Conscience in Early Modern England. Boston, Brill Academic Publishers, 1995.
• Leites, Edmund, ed. Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• Randal, Marlin. Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion. Orchard Park, NY, Broadview Press, 2002.
• Zagorin, Perez. "The Historical Significance of Lying and Dissimulation—Truth-Telling, Lying, and Self-Deception." Social Research, Fall 1996.