Augustine on Lying

Written for Dr. Gerald Boersma's class, Theology of Augustine, April 20, 2021

In De mendacio, Augustine sets out to prove that the prohibition against lying is one without exception, and that to lie is to risk our very souls. He states, “I shall treat this question so carefully as to seem to be seeking truth myself along with the questioners.”[1] He holds that classification of every lie is embraced in “Thou shalt not lie bear false witness.” Augustine will go on to give examples, and gives what he feels is a definitive list of the eight types of lies.

What makes a lie, a lie? Lucy always tells Charlie Brown that she will not pull the football away, but she always does. Is she always lying, or should Charlie know better than to believe her? Jane asks her husband Jake “Does this outfit make me look fat?” Is any answer more honest than “Honey, I love you just the way you look?” If I say I live west of Hagen Ranch Road, but I am mistaken; I am actually slightly east, have I lied?

Aquinas tells us that a lie is a deliberate misstatement, meant to deceive. Lucy always lies to Charlie; even though Charlie knows she always lies: his faith in her ultimate goodness does not make her lie less of a lie. Jake has avoided answering the intent of Jane’s question, but his response is not a lie. I have not lied about the location of my home; I simply erred in my statement.

Griffiths states “the lie is a verbal act, something we do with words.”[2] It is a deliberate act; we lie with the intent to lie. “The characteristic mark of the lie is duplicity, a fissure between thought and utterance that is clearly evident to the speaker as she speaks.”[3] Lucy’s lie to Charlie Brown is always duplicitous. No matter how much she tells him that this time, she will not pull the ball away, we know that she always will. Jake’s answer to Jane is true, because he sees her through loving eyes.

A statement may be duplicitous without intending to deceive. Griffiths gives the example of a skeptical friend who never believes what you say. If she asks you if it is safe to swim in a riptide current, you know she will take your answer to be false. Instead of honestly telling her that especially considering her swimming skills, she should not swim in such a strong current, you offhandedly say “Oh, yeah, sure, perfectly safe.” Since she never believes you, she now believes it is unsafe to swim in a riptide current. You have therefore conveyed to her what is true, and she believes it is true, but you were only able to do so by telling her what is false. Griffiths concedes that Augustine doesn’t directly say you haven’t lied, but “it’s clear that what really counts for Augustine in avoiding the lie is that ‘the mind is thoroughly aware that it is saying what it knows, judges, or believes to be true.’ Intentional duplicity, in short, is what really counts about the lie, and its avoidance is what counts in avoiding the lie.”[4]

We lie by words, by what we say and by what we omit. If you are asked if you have finished reading an assigned book, and reply “I read the last page last night!” you may mean you finished the book, but you may also mean you read the first and last chapters, but no more than that. Augustine “claimed that when someone knowingly says what he takes to be false then it’s beyond a doubt that he lies.”[5] The lie here is no less of a lie than if you gushed about what a great book it was, and how much you enjoyed it. Telling less than the full truth is quite often telling a lie.

In Chapter 5, Augustine addresses the issue of those who believe that is may be useful to lie with the intention of deceiving, giving examples of certain lies in the Old Testament. One of these is that of the Egyptian midwives, who “lest the Hebrew children should be killed at birth, had lied with the approbation and reward of God.”[6] The story of the midwives is told in Exodus:

When you serve as midwife to the Hebrew women, and see them upon the birthstool, if it is a son, you shall kill him; but if it is a daughter, she shall live. But the midwives feared God, and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but let the male children live. So the king of Egypt called the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this, and let the male children live?” The midwives said to the Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and are delivered before the midwife comes to them.” So God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and grew very strong.[7]

Augustine states, “Choosing examples of this sort, they recount the lies of persons one would not dare to blame and thus lead one to admit that, at times, a lie is not only undeserving of reproof but is even worthy of praise.”[8] He goes on to say “in the decalogue itself it is written ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness ,’ in which classification every lie is embraced, for whoever pronounces any statement gives testimony to his own mind.”[9]

Augustine further states that these others

say that these women were approved and rewarded by God in relation to their own progress. For, he who is accustomed to lies in order to harm people has accomplished much if he now lies only to help others. It is one thing to have an action set forth as praiseworthy in itself , and another to have it extolled in comparison with something worse than itself.[10]

In Chapter 6, Augustine lays out his reason for his strict prohibition against lying saying “‘What if a man should flee to you who, by your lie, can be saved from death?’ That death, feared foolishly by men who do not fear to sin, kills not the soul but the body....”[11] He references here Matthew 10:2, which states “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”[12] However, his argument here is difficult to justify. He appears to thus condemn the Egyptian midwives, although Scripture tells us they were rewarded by God. He specifically states “Since, therefore, eternal life is lost by lying, a lie may never be told for the preservation of the temporal life of another.”[13] Would Augustine then condemn those who hid Jewish children from the advancing Nazis? I do not think he makes a convincing argument that a lie to save the life of another, particularly an innocent other, is an unforgivable sin in the sight of God. He later states, “Rather, we desire to prevent and we do prevent them from doing it so far as lies within our power; not only do we refrain from joining them in their evil doing, but we condemn it as vigorously as we can.”[14] Yet, by his insistence that lying is never permitted, he may make us unable to” refrain from joining them” and even from “condemning it.” If we must give up the innocent rather than lie to protect them, we are in fact joining them, and we are in fact not condemning them vigorously

Griffiths states that “For Augustine, then, duplicitous speech cannot occur by accident. It happens only when speakers decide to contradict what is in their hearts by what is on their lips.”[15] again belies the problem of lying to save an innocent. If, say, in 1942 Germany, I do not tell of the Jewish family hidden in my attic, and in fact deny there is anyone hidden in my attic, I am not contradicting what is in my heart by what is on my lips. What is in my heart is saving the lives of those being hunted in an evil regime. How can I then be putting my soul in jeopardy if I am lying to save God's children? Augustine’s proposed answer to this problem, given in Chapter 13, is to say, “I know where he is but I will never disclose it.”[16] If, in the situation I describe, you gave that answer, you would have immediately been shot, and then no one would be able to provide sustenance to those you were hiding. By refusing to lie, you would have condemned them to a slow, torturous death.

Griffiths explains quite clearly the limitations of Augustine's arguments:

But the fact that it's often unclear whether a particular utterance is a lie on Augustine’s definition isn't an object to his enterprise. Augustine is concerned only to interrogate (and ban) utterances that do clearly meet the criteria he states, and all he needs for that enterprise to get underway is that there be such cases.[17]

However, as Griffiths points out:

Many (perhaps most) Christian theorists of his time thought that what Augustine took to be a lie could at times properly be told. Augustine argues that this is not so: that there are clear cases of duplicitous speech, and that these should be placed under an exceptionless ban. He is not interested in defending the application of his definition to ambiguous cases, and to object to his enterprise by saying that there are cases not clearly covered by it is to miss its point.[18]

However, Augustine’s failure to define more tightly what ought fall under his exceptionless ban makes his enterprise faulty. Essentially, there are no exceptions to the lies covered under a faulty definition; therefore, any time we want there to be an exception, we can claim it is outside the definition.

In Chapter 14, Augustine classifies all lies into eight types. The first one is a lie uttered in the teaching of religion, which he calls “a deadly one which should be avoided and shunned from afar.”[19] In the excerpt we read, Augustine does not give an example of this type of lie, and I cannot imagine anyone deliberately lying like this, but I agree it would be an egregious lie.

The second type of lie described by Augustine is a lie which helps no one but unjustly injures another. Sally’s consistent lie to Charlie Brown would fall into this, as he is always injured both bodily and mentally by her antics.

The third type is a lie that helps one person, but harms someone else. Any child who has ever been unjustly punished will likely recognize this type of lie.

Augustine calls the fourth type “the real lie;”[20] it is a lie told just for the pleasure one gains by lying and deceiving another. When we were children, my sister was a frequent teller of this type of lie, a lie with no purpose or benefit.

Augustine’s fifth type of lie is that which is told to please others in smooth discourse. As someone who facilitates adult faith formation groups, I find this type of lie rather easy to fall into; saying “thank you for sharing that” is generally a better response than “that has nothing to do with anything we’re talking about.”

The sixth type of lie is one “which harms no one and benefits some person;” Augustine’s example is that of “a person , knowing that another's money is to be taken away unjustly, answers the question are untruthfully and says that he does not know where the money is.”[21] The seventh type, according to Augustine, is “that which is harmful to no one and beneficial to some person.” Augustine’s example here is “the case where a judge is questioning, as happens when a person lies because he is unwilling to betray a man sought for capital punishment.”[22] I find neither Augustine’s definition nor example of types six and seven to warrant any reason to separate them into separate types of lies.

Augustine’s eighth type of lie is that “which is harmful to no one and beneficial to the extent that it protects someone from physical defilement.”[23]

Griffiths sums up Augustine’s position on lying succinctly:

The speaker is the privileged authority on the question of whether he lies. Since the Augustinian definition of the line is indexed to the speaker's understanding of the relation between her thought and speech, you will always know better than anyone else whether a particular utterance of yours was duplicitous.[24]

Griffiths gives this example: “Nixon, then, was in a better position than anyone else to know whether, when he said ‘I am not a crook,’ he spoke duplicitously.”[25]

Griffiths concludes Chapter 1 by stating that

When your thought is voiced in such a way that it's utterance seems to you duplicitous, then you have lied. The decision so to speak is a sin in Augustine's view, and the understanding of sin that makes it reasonable to say this is in turn intimately linked with a particular view of what it is to exist, to be.[26]

Augustine has not totally convinced me that all lies are necessarily offenses against the commandment to not bear false witness. At the same time, I realize that we only read a portion of De mendacio, and only a small percentage of all of his works. While I cannot defend his conclusion, I concede he is better positioned than I to make that judgment.

[1] Augustine 53

[2] Griffiths 25

[3] Griffiths 25

[4] Griffiths 29

[5] Griffiths 29

[6] Augustine 60

[7] Exodus 1:16-20

[8] Augustine 60

[9] Augustine 61

[10] Augustine 62

[11] Augustine 66-67

[12] Matthew 10:28