On this reading of scripture, language provides an explanatory model for all action, divine and human. “The beginning of every work is the word,” Augustine notes, and just as God made all things through “His only-begotten word, so there are no works of man which are not first spoken in the heart.” Our gestures and actions, no less than our spoken words, signify the inner word and its eternal truth, and whether or not we choose to embody and obey that truth reveals our own relation to Christ, who is the Word embodied. “The Son alone,” Augustine writes, “who is the word of God, was made flesh … in order that by our word following and imitating His example, we might live rightly, that is, that we might have no lie either in the contemplation or in the work of our word.”20 Every lie is a sin because, fundamentally, every sin is a lie, every sin takes the form of false signification. Every sin is a lie because sin is nothing but a turning from and rejection of the truth, a refusal to signify and express it, to speak it, in our lives. Like the snake whose motions depend on “the most minute movement of its scales,” this rejection begins subtly and imperceptibly as we slowly slip away from the good “with the perverse desire of becoming like God.” Augustine’s allusion to the snake recalls Adam and Eve, whose transgression, he believed, made sense only if they had already inwardly turned from God’s Word, preferring to follow their private passions and pleasures rather than obey God’s command.21
It is this fear of the subtle and unperceived turn from God that gives force to Augustine’s prohibition against all lies, against all false assertion. When we choose to sin, to lie, even if we sin and lie for the good, for the greatest good, we set ourselves up as arbiters of good and evil, we imagine ourselves to be like God, and the consequences of that error are all too obvious. “When a man lives according to truth,” Augustine writes in The City of God, “then, he lives not according to self, but according to God; for it is God Who has said, ‘I am the truth.’ When he lives according to self, however,—that is, according to man, and not according to God—he then certainly lives according falsehood.” In this turn from God, we imitate the Devil, who chose to live according to himself rather than abide in the truth. And, as Augustine is only too eager to remind his readers, “The devil is not only a liar, he is ‘the father of lies’: he was, indeed, the first to lie, and falsehood, like sin, began with him.”22
Just as Augustine’s prohibition against lies flows from his conception of God, so too does his definition of what it means to lie. In On Lying, a treatise he had written some twenty-five years before Against Lying, Augustine writes that the liar is a person “who has one thing in his mind but expresses something else with words or any other sort of indication.” We lie when we embody falsity in words or in deeds and, in so doing, disrupt our likeness to God, who is Truth, and the Son, who is the full and total embodiment of that truth. According to this definition, the objective truth or falsity of what the liar says is irrelevant. We lie whenever we intend to assert what is false, whenever we keep one thing in our heart but say something else. We can even lie when we speak the truth, so long as we believe what we are saying is false. At times though, Augustine offers a slightly different definition of the lie. “The fault of the person who tells a lie,” Augustine continues, “consists in his desire to deceive in expressing his thought.”23 In Against Lying, Augustine would frame this conception of the lie in the form that John Downame still repeated as definitive in the seventeenth century: “A lie is a false signification made with a will to deceive.”24 According to this second and admittedly more influential definition, the liar intends two things, both to state what is false and to deceive his listener.
Augustine is well aware that the will to assert what is false is not necessarily the same as the will to deceive, and he examines this difference in On Lying. Do we lie when we assert what we believe to be false without intending to deceive? Does the intention to deceive define all lies, or does it define a particular type of lie? To explore these problems, Augustine works through a variety of complex scenarios in which a person knowingly states a factual untruth or states the truth while thinking it is false, and in which a person states a falsehood precisely because he knows his listener will not believe him and, therefore, will end up believing what is true. At the end of these circuitous analyses whose subtleties are difficult to work through at best, Augustine concludes that it is safest to always speak the truth. “For there is no need to be afraid of any of those definitions,” he writes, “when the mind has a good conscience as it utters what it either knows, or opines, or believes to be true, and has no wish to make anything believed but what it utters.”25 Perhaps the person who states what is false with the intention to deceive is the most obvious sort of liar, but we should always be wary of anything that involves us in falsehood and duplicity, of anything that threatens our always fragile likeness to God.26
Every lie may well be a sin, every sin may well distance us from God, but Augustine also recognizes that the intentions governing our lies matter. Some lies are worse than others, and he has little doubt that God will deal more harshly with liars whose sins are “committed in the spirit of harm” than with those “committed in the spirit of help.”27 Augustine contends there are three broad categories of lies—the malicious, the neutral, and the beneficial or officious. These three categories themselves can be subdivided into eight different species. There are, Augustine explains, three types of malicious lies, that is, three types of lies that are told to cause harm: there are lies spoken when teaching others about the faith (and this lie, Augustine warns, “is a deadly one which should be avoided and shunned from afar”), lies that harm someone and help no one, and lies that harm someone while helping someone else. The middle or neutral category of lies consists of two types, lies told simply for the love of lying (and this type, Augustine adds, “is a pure lie”) and lies told to please others. Rounding out the list are three types of beneficial lies, which help others while causing no harm. There are lies that protect a person’s temporal goods from unjust seizure, lies told to save the lives of the innocent (“with the exception of the case where a judge is questioning”) and, finally, those lies we tell to save someone “from physical defilement.”28
Augustine’s division of lies into three categories and eight types, just like his prohibition, would become canonical, suggesting something like a hierarchy or ranking of lies from the most sinful to the least. While later writers would use Augustine’s list to distinguish between those lies that are mortal sins and those that are merely venial and, perhaps, justifiable, Augustine himself never does this. On those few occasions when he considers whether some lies are worse than others, he does so only to shut down such speculation almost immediately.29 We must never tempt God’s mercy—we must never lie in the hope that the good we achieve will guarantee pardon for the sin we intentionally commit. In his mercy, Augustine explains, God may well pardon past sins for subsequent good works or forgive the person who, in a moment of crisis, performs “a deed of mercy and a deed of deception.” These instances of God’s mercy can in no way warrant choosing to sin for some hoped-for good. There are real differences between seeking atonement for sins already committed and choosing to “sin in order to do good,” and they are differences we must never forget. “Whether we should ever tell a lie if it be for someone’s welfare,” he warns, “is a problem that has vexed even the most learned.”30 Vexatious or not, Augustine warns that it is a problem best avoided. In Against Lies, he asks Consentius to consider the story of Lot who, in an effort to prevent two male guests from being defiled, offers “the men of Sodom, both young and old,” the pleasure of laying with his two daughters. Lot thought he should allow lesser sins to occur for the sake of avoiding greater ones, “since it is less evil for women to suffer violation than men.” But Augustine fears Lot’s is a losing gambit. “If we open this road to sins,” he argues, “of committing lesser ones ourselves so that others do not commit greater ones, then, as though all barriers had been shattered and removed, e
very sin will enter and reign supreme.” We will commit thefts to prevent greater thefts, incest to avoid murder, and every sort of lie will find a circumstance to sanction it.31
Perhaps God will concern himself with why we lie, will forgive some liars and punish others, but we should never presume to make such judgments ourselves. To do that is to follow the Devil’s path, and that path leads nowhere but to our damnation.
BIBLICAL LIARS
Augustine’s absolute prohibition against lies faced one great stumbling block. There are passages in the Bible in which it seems that lies are told and told well, that is, told without guilt and without sin. There are, for example, the Hebrew midwives who, when Pharaoh asked why they had not killed every male child as soon as it was born, replied, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes for them.” Jacob, following his mother’s advice, pretends to be his brother Esau and obtains his blind father Isaac’s benediction. In this case Jacob goes so far as to wear goatskin so that should his father touch him, he will feel like his hairy brother. Abraham at one point announces that his wife Sarah is his sister. There are even problematic moments in the Gospels. For example, following his resurrection, Jesus pretends to walk farther than he really intends.32 Augustine worries repeatedly over the possible consequences of lowering his absolute standard and admitting the acceptability of certain sorts of lies. “He who says that there are some just lies,” Augustine writes in Against Lies, “must be regarded as saying nothing else than that there are some just sins and, consequently, that some things which are unjust are just.”33 Not only does such a standard result in unacceptable logical and moral paradoxes, it also introduces a slew of practical problems. If some lies are acceptable, then how would we ever know when to believe a person’s statements and when not to? More important, how could we be sure that any given passage from the Bible itself had been asserted as truth? On what basis could adjudication be made to determine whether on any particular occasion these words, this passage, were being offered sincerely or duplicitously, as models of holy behavior to emulate or sacrilege to condemn?34
Faced with these challenges, Augustine deploys his prohibition against lying as the basis for something like a nascent literary theory and hermeneutic for the Bible. Since God cannot lie and every lie is a sin, there can be no justifiable lies in the Bible. In all these cases of apparent Biblical deception, Augustine will therefore find it necessary to argue that either the alleged lie is no lie at all or that, if it clearly is a lie, the lie itself is not approved, not held up as a model of virtuous behavior. In the case of the midwives, for example, God rewarded them, not for lying, but for saving the lives of the Hebrew babies. Augustine suggests that even their ignorance, their acculturation into the ways of the Egyptians, not to mention the impossibility before the dispensation of Christ of their having clearly known the ethical imperative of truth-telling, all served as mitigating factors in God’s eyes.35
By contrast with this clear case of Biblical lying, Augustine adopts a variety of different strategies to remove the taint of falsehood from other alleged cases of scriptural untruthfulness. Considering Abraham, Augustine distinguishes concealing the truth from lying. Abraham speaks the truth because he and Sarah share the same father (although not the same mother). He simply “conceals something of the truth.” Extending this line of thought, Augustine writes, “It is not a lie when truth is passed over in silence, but when falsehood is brought forth in speech.”36
Jacob’s apparent lie presents a much tougher case, but one that Augustine resolves by stressing, again, the dangers of assuming there are acceptable lies in the Bible. The very possibility of reading parts of scripture allegorically, as mysteries or figures, depends upon this prohibition. “If we call it a lie,” writes Augustine, “then all parables and figures for signifying anything which are not to be taken literally, but in which one thing must be understood for another, will be called lies.”37 In other words, the presence of an apparent false statement or deceptive act in the Bible, one that is neither condemned nor shown not to be a lie at all (as in Abraham’s case), provides something like the justification, even the need, to engage in a figurative reinterpretation of the act that will render it truthful. As Augustine puts it in On Lying, the prophets of the Old Testament “did and said all that is related about them in a prophetic manner.”38 While it would certainly seem as if Jacob lied to his father when he announced, “I am Esau thy firstborn” and deceived him when he extended his goatskin-covered hand, Augustine will claim that Jacob had no intention of deceiving Isaac, much less of lying to him. Here it is a matter of relocating Jacob’s words and deeds within a broader context, not as a response to his father’s question, a question posed at a specific time and at a specific place, but rather in terms of what Jacob intended to signify, the transference of the elder brother’s primacy and inheritance to the younger, of the future transference of God’s covenant from the Jews to the Christians. Augustine attempts to reel in the potential for interpretive excess when he contends that what is presented as a mystery in one place in scripture must be presented clearly and openly in another—the Bible as a whole forms the proper context for interpreting such speech acts.39 And yet, this strategy reveals a deeper problem that Augustine seems to recognize but ignores. How do such prophetic cases from the Bible relate to ordinary, nonbiblical, nonprophetic acts of communication in which, given the proximate causes and contexts, not to mention the reasonable expectations of the other participants, such statements and actions could hardly seem to be anything if not deceitful?
AUGUSTINE AMONG THE SCHOLASTICS
If Augustine’s legacy loomed large for medieval theologians, it was an odd legacy when they concerned themselves with the problem of lying. In a sense, not a single medieval theologian agreed with the great North African bishop’s analysis of mendacity. Certainly, they all endorsed Augustine’s claim that every lie is a sin and quoted approvingly from his writings, but not one of them ever agreed with Augustine’s reasons for believing that every lie is sin. They didn’t agree with it because, it seems, they didn’t know anything about it. Scholastic analyses of lying never draw from Augustine’s treatise On the Trinity, where he elaborates his Christological analysis of lying and sin. Rather, they focus almost entirely on the two treatises he devoted exclusively to the topic of lying, On Lying and Against Lying, or on similar passages from his Enchiridion. Moreover, given that Scholastic theologians consistently made use of the same few sections from these treatises, it is likely they rarely, if ever, read the treatises themselves and certainly not in their entirety. What they seem to have known about Augustine’s ideas they knew mostly from collections of excerpts, such as the ones Peter Lombard had included in his Sentences.40 Scholastic writers, in other words, read these passages without their surrounding contexts in Augustine’s own works, contexts in which he often qualified or amended their meaning. Scholastic writers did not so much follow Augustine as borrow some of his statements to serve as the basic building blocks for their own analyses of mendacity. As a result, they often sound Augustinian even as they diverge, often radically, from Augustine’s own opinions. This is particularly evident in Scholastic discussions about the way in which the liar offends against the virtue of truth and in the importance they place on intention, on why the liar lies.
Writing in the 1260s, the Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas has no doubt that every lie is a sin. “Words by their very nature,” he writes, “being signs of thought, it is contrary to their nature and out of order for anyone to convey in words something other than what he thinks.”41 Though many subsequent theologians would take this assertion as self-explanatory, as if lying were a sin simply because the liar misuses language, Aquinas means something more, something else. The liar does in fact misuse language, but he misuses it because he offends against the virtue of truth. Significantly, Thomas links truth with justice, the virtue that defines how we should interact w
ith and treat others. The virtue of truth, like justice, Thomas contends, obliges us to engage in honest, fair, and open dealings with others. It is an obligation rooted in our nature as social and intellectual animals, and it requires that our statements and actions reflect who we are and what we care about. Just as “justice sets up a certain equality between things,” Thomas explains, “so does the virtue of truth, for it equals signs to the things which concern man himself.”42 The liar offends against justice because he fails to render to others the truth that he owes them. Thomas is very clear about this, and this is why, like Augustine, he locates the essence of the lie, not in the intention to deceive, but in the intention to say or to show what is false, to embody dishonesty. The desire to deceive, he explains, directs this initial inequality toward others, when we assert or show what is false in order to deceive someone. “Deception,” Thomas explains, “belongs to the perfection of lying.”43
And it is precisely the lie’s perfection, according to Thomas, that determines its severity. Adopting Augustine’s division of the sin of lying into three categories and eight types, Thomas contends that lies committed in the spirit of harm, lies against charity, are more grievous than those committed for the good. Lies told against charity are mortal sins, whereas officious lies, lies told for the benefit of our neighbors, are merely venial. Augustine himself had suggested that malicious lies were more serious than beneficial or compensatory lies, but he had refused to pursue the matter, and this refusal speaks to his contention that lying is at the basis of all sin. When we sin, we turn from God and from the Truth as we mimic the Devil in his fatal descent into unlikeness. Augustine’s two treatises on lying resonate with the emotional tension he suffers between the demand to love God and his occasional belief that a minor sin might save the life of a loved one. His anguish arises from the profound abyss that he believes every false assertion carves out between sinner and God. While Thomas is no less vociferous in his assertion that every lie is a sin, his decision to discuss the nature and severity of different kinds of lies, to separate them into mortal and venial sins, suggests a lessening of that tension that so tortured Augustine. Much of this derives from Thomas’s decision to annex truth to justice. When we lie, we offend against justice defined primarily in terms of our obligations to ourselves and others, and those violations are less severe when they entangle us in venial as opposed to mortal sins. Augustine had considered the danger of lying entirely in terms of the liar’s relation to God. Thomas emphasizes the positive or negative consequences that our lies will have on others.44
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