ABSTRACT
Blasphemy laws in Europe were instituted to protect a kind of religious truth, as Nidhi calls it, “truth-beyond-truth.” To insult the religion was to insult this truth-beyond-truth. Fostering teachings contrary to accepted religious doctrine was heresy, the teaching of falsehoods (claiming that truthbeyond-truth was not true). If one’s sayings were deemed heretical, one’s intentions were accordingly evil. The Spanish Inquisition tried to avert evil and, despite Catholic heresy trials against the likes of Galileo, the Enlightenment version of “the truth” (a secular one) largely eventually prevailed over the truth-beyond-truth of the religious realm. As defamation laws became distinct from blasphemy and heresy, they nevertheless continued to embody intention as an essential element, positing that bad intentions create lies and good intentions produce the truth. A coordinate step implied a connection between the feeling of defamation or insult and the untruth that produced it. In Europe, for a number of centuries, defamation cases with no particular religious overtones retained these associations; arguing a statement’s truth was not permitted. The only points argued were who said or published it and whether the words would result in other people looking down on the one so defamed. Only in the eighteenth century could the truth be argued in defamation cases (see Chapter 1, John Peter Zenger), but even today the matter is far from over. Indeed, the charge of treason retains certain aspects of blasphemy which focus on insult that overwhelms questions of
truth. I suggest that wherever either religious sentiment is strong or within a sacralized realm (which some constitutional monarchies might still be), the association between insult and untruth still holds.
