When, in the middle ages, scholastic thinkers gained access to works written by Islamic and Greek philosophers, they ran into trouble.
In the works of Averroes and Aristotle, the churchmen of Catholic Europe discovered numerous claims which, while compellingly argued, directly contradicted the received teachings of the Church. In order to get around these difficulties (the story goes) they devised a way of thinking known as “double truth”, whereby the claims of religion and those of philosophy were kept separate from each other, as if they described two entirely different universes. This way there was no need to reconcile the two systems, no need to make the difficult choice between faith and reason, God and Truth.
Whether anyone ever believed in “double truth”, I don’t know. The idea, though, is easy to discredit. If Aristotle says the world never had a beginning, and Genesis says it did, then one of the two is either wrong or misunderstood. Holding the two ideas separate from each other is simply a way of delaying the inevitable realization that one must choose between them. It’s a convenient way to avoid conflict, but at the price of being wrong at least half of the time.
Why would anyone think this way? It seems insane.
But this sort of multiple-truth theory is not quite as insane as it seems. It is actually quite common, though most of us never notice or think about the fact that we do it. And we manage to avoid the conflict not by thinking there are multiple contradictory truths about the world, but by occupying separate environments with separate intellectual and behavioral habits proper to each of them. The set of operating principles, dispositions, speech codes, and modes of activity acceptable in one domain are often particular to that domain or sphere of activity, and often differ quite strongly from the principles, priorities, etc. that govern other spheres of activity.
Consider a banker who is also a devout Catholic. At work the profit motive governs, perhaps with some adjustments here and there. At church he is entirely different. If we asked our banker questions about banking he would reason one way. If we asked him questions of a religious nature, he would answer differently.
People tend to write off these differences as “failings”, as if we are all really trying to exhibit our religious beliefs in every aspect of our lives, but for most people, actually trying to think and behave that way (consistently, seriously, all the time) would be nearly impossible and probably look like madness. Imagine going through life with the attitude of tender devotion one has during a Sunday sermon. It’s inconceivable, and the very attempt would erase the aspects of oneself that exist outside that context, leaving behind a piety incapable of dealing with most situations in life.
As a child I ran into this problem when I first became really serious about Christianity. I remember reading C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and specifically the very ending, where he talks about “selfhood in Christ”:
Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
When I read this I took it very seriously. At the time my main pastimes were playing computer games and reading fantasy novels. From Lewis’s account of Christianity, which gelled with what I’d read of the gospels, what was being asked of me was the negation of all my other interests, the subsumption of my entire self, my entire personality, all my wishes and desires, to the “personality” of Jesus Christ. This was very difficult. Did I need to stop reading books for fun? Did I need to give up video games and the rest? I was troubled by this.
The conclusion I came to at the time was that, no, I actually needed to continue living my life, even if there was an understanding that ideally, eventually, everything I did would be directed toward the negation of myself in Christ. Or to put it more directly: the conclusion I reached was to say that Lewis was right, but to set that thought aside, and relegate it to only the domains where I felt it was applicable. This is what “double truth” looks like in practice.
Later on, I extended this mode of behavior to other aspects of my life. I was passionately interested in science as a kid. In high school I revived and led the physics club, read popular books by Feynman and Einstein, and loved TV shows like Nova and Scientific American: Frontiers. But I was also raised to be a biblical literalist. I believed in a six day creation. My parents raised me to believe that dinosaurs were forgeries and Noah’s ark a true historical object. I believed all this. To the extent that natural history contradicted it, I maintained a quiet hostility toward natural history, but granted it suppositions on its own turf. This is to say that, in my own way, subtly, without thinking about it, I embraced “double truth”, shifting affirmations as I shifted environments, treating one set of claims as true in one context, and avoiding engagement with it when I was in a different one.
I think the closest thing to recognizing this behavior we have in popular culture are the concepts of “code switching” and “cognitive dissonance”. Code switching captures the way we adjust speech habits to signal membership in a specific social setting. Cognitive dissonance highlights the implicit contradiction between activity in one sphere of life and stated beliefs held in another. “Hypocrisy” is of course another word that comes to mind.
It’s not actually that hard to draw a line between hypocrisy and the sort of context-dependent reasoning I described earlier. Hypocrisy arises whenever the principles active in one domain condemn one’s activities in another, and the two are sustained nonetheless. Suppose our banker makes money off of predatory loans, to the detriment of his borrowers. His Catholicism strictly prohibits this sort of activity, while his banking livelihood depends on it. He affirms the Catholic principles in Church. He forgets about them at work. He carries on. (Banking is an easy example here. One might think of someone whose job involves systematic deceit, or someone who has elaborate anti-modern artistic views and yet loves dancing to Lady Gaga. The possible hypocrisies are endless.)
Late in my time as a Catholic I used to wonder how so many of my coreligionists managed to avoid confronting the obvious contradictions presented by the Church today. One common attack on Catholics who are too serious in grappling with these tensions in their faith is to say that they’re behaving like “protestants” (a dirty word), or to point out that one is a “convert” (another dirty word). These attacks imply that the person has somehow missed an essential and obvious fact abut Catholicism that people raised in the religion take for granted; that they are somehow functioning within a deficient mental framework with respect to their faith.
This implication used to puzzle me. What exactly was the hidden thing that cradle Catholics somehow know and converts don’t? Even though I was a convert (from protestantism, no less) I had grown up in Catholic schools, gone through sacramental preparation with all my peers, and then repeated the whole process of catechism and formation via RCIA and graduate school. There was nothing obvious about Catholicism that I was missing, unless it was some secret accessible only to a few.
After I left the church this puzzle stuck with me, and I kept thinking about it. The conclusion I reached was that, by calling someone a “convert” or otherwise policing their thought habits in this way, Catholics are accusing the person of taking things too seriously. In other words, despite the emphatic preference of the Church for self-sacrificial saints and radical zealots of all stripes, the key mark of a “convert” is someone who has failed to find the correct limit within which to contain the intellectual domain of Catholicism. Converts “just don’t get it”, because they’ve missed part of the young Catholic’s education in the faith. Namely, the fact that outside of Church, where other norms and logic govern, one needn’t think too much about all that—even if within the Church one insists that the logic of Catholicism is all-encompassing.
I’ve run across a number of manifestations of this variety of hypocrisy. One sees it in the Church’s official handling of clerical abuse, which in some areas is full of compassion for victims, but legally and financially reflects hostility toward victims and the refusal to admit guilt. One sees it also among progressive Christians, who brow-beat others with judgmental bible passages about social justice, while ignoring what scripture has to say about their own less traditional views. Perhaps its most essential form is in the lives of priests, which are split between occupying a mask of sanctity and grace (“in persona Christi”) and being ordinary schmucks like everyone else, with little spiritual distinction of note, and often a good deal of bitterness, naiveté, and solitude.
For my own part, the mental bifurcation has taken a couple of huge forms. First there was the old cosmological breakdown that never got resolved: how to square the facts of modern science with the cosmology of traditional Christianity. Even in light of modern accommodations made by the Church toward things like evolution and the big bang, the unanswered questions are vast and disturbing. As soon as one tries to really integrate the two systems of thought, a set of insurmountable aporias about divine revelation, original sin, nature, and violence occur which I have never found compelling answers to.
Because of this, as I got older I tended to become more comfortable thinking along two totally separate lines about different subjects. When I was reading articles about astronomy or physics I left theology at the door. When I was thinking about theology or religion, I set aside most questions about modern science. One result of this bifurcation was that, when it came time for me to leave Christianity, I had a worldview available that was largely ready-to-go. I simply eased into it, retaining what scraps of my theological worldview still made sense with it. In many ways this process was easier than the previous, bifurcated approach had been, because it meant that for once I just had to think one thing. I could be a little bit more whole.
The other huge bifurcation was around my sexuality. Until my mid-20s I firmly refused to acknowledge that I was gay. The desperate need to reject this part of myself led to a conspicuous blindness about certain people and activities. I was incapable of recognizing flirting from other people, and even incapable of admitting to myself when my friendliness gave others the wrong message. I misinterpreted the behavior of characters in movies, and the basis of my attractions to certain actors, certain friends, certain stories. My sexual attractions were occasionally undeniable, but their emergence was brief and they would be repressed away again swiftly. When I was 21 I remember reading a poem with the following lines, which stayed with me:
Do you think the dictionary ever says to itself
I’ve got these words that mean completely
different things inside myself
and it’s tearing me apart?
My errors are even bigger than that. In reality it was only once I left the Church and accepted my sexuality that the mental bifurcation I had experienced started to go away. I didn't feel the need to curl up in shame and sadness in light of my sexual feelings. Instead I found that I could be remarkably mentally continuous, even see the beauty in my sexuality, and embrace the desire for closeness and unity as part of me, and a beautiful part at that.
This post has become quite long. At the beginning I said that living with multiple different ways of looking at things is an ordinary part of life for most of us. We shift all the time between contexts that require different priorities and encompass different sorts of thinking and behavior, and we use the tools we find best suited to each. This only becomes pathological when one sphere cannot cope with the existence, actions, or beliefs of another.
To close, I’d like to draw a brief analogy to bookkeeping. One can divide one’s finances between as many different accounts as one likes, keep them isolated from each other, etc. But if, in the midst of this, one starts keeping books that contradict each other, that hide or implicitly deny the existence of each other—that’s when intellectual complexity becomes fraud. And just as in bookkeeping, we commit fraud against ourselves and each other by sustaining contradictions in different aspects of our lives, by hiding ourselves from ourselves, by allowing one half of us to pretend that the other half isn’t real, or doesn’t deserve to exist.