The problem of lie in works of Christian medieval thinkers

Analyzing an ontological doctrine of the truth shaped by the church intellectuals both of the West and the East the author demonstrates that the elite culture of the Middle Ages created a deep and multidimensional perception of the truth. In the light of that Christian culture the truth was understood as correspondence binding a mode of existence of a thing with God's eternal design of the latter. In particular a person is as much true in that sense as one embodies the divine idea, or logos, in one's own life. The logos includes a human nature designed by God and a mode of existence proper to it. According to medieval thinkers' views, lie had been brought in the world by the devil - the first being who willfully perverted his mode of existence having rebelled against God and consequently against his own nature as a nature of every thing is based in God. Being a key kind of the evil lie shares with it a common feature - existentional vacuum: it is what is absent in the existence. Therefore a principal incompatibility towards the truth and lie was stated. A "good" lie is a fiction because there are not such good aims in fact to which a lie could direct. This thesis explains reasons of ethical maximalism preached by the medieval Church. The latter postulated a radical refusal of lie demending from its members to be perfectly true. Studying attempts to work out a typology of lie the author considers appropriate conceptions and draws of the St. Augustine, St. Isidore of Seville, St. Dorotheus of Gaza. It is also argued the presented doctrine of lie was not an idle intellectual play, but a sort of diagnosis of illness that has been making humankind suffer since the transgression. Understanding of the illness put a problem of its therapy before the thinkers. Its methods are analyzed in the work as well.

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