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There is a long tradition of moral reasoning maintaining that deception is sometimes justified by the context in which it takes place. A Christian household in Germany during World War II is providing a hiding place for a Jewish child. Questioned by Nazis, the family deny that they are harboring a Jew. In doing so, they are not violating God's commandment against lying. It is fair to say that most Christians accept this notion, though they will often disagree in specific cases.
Lying: An Augustinian Theology of Duplicity
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But what if most Christians are wrong? What if lying is never permissible, whatever the circumstances? Such is Paul Griffiths' argument in Lying: An Augustinian Theology of Duplicity.
Augustine wrote two treatises on the subject of lying. The second (Contra mendacium) was written later in life specifically for Christians who sought to infiltrate the worship places of heretical groups; the first (De mendacio) was written relatively early in his career, before the Confessions, and has the more dispassionate tone of a classical examination of the morality of duplicity.
The early text concludes by classifying lies into eight different kinds: the most grave is the lie that pertains to religious doctrine, and the least grave is the lie that harms no one, and perhaps even prevents bodily harm such as rape or murder. But Augustine is uncomfortable with a position that might hold that lying can be permissible if it occurs with an intent to dogood—a position held by certain classical as well as Christian authors. All lying, he insists, is sinful by nature, and so should be avoided by the Christian. Even the most benign lie, told in order to preserve one's spouse or one's self from violation, one's child from murder, or a stranger from the effects of a genocidal war, is a sinful act because it proceeds from an act of faithlessness. A fundamental trust is betrayed when a man judges for himself that the bodily good of another is of greater value than the truth (as he judges it to be). The result is a denial of the reality of God's providential care since, Augustine concludes, "God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able to bear, but will with the temptation make also a way to escape."
Griffiths' reading of Augustine is generally very good, and theologically subtle, but the scope of his argument extends far beyond an exegesis of Augustinian texts. The book has three sections. The first presents Augustine's position on lying in the context of Griffiths' understanding of Augustine's theory of language and theological anthropology. (Here it is important to note Griffths' insistence that the lie in Augustinian terms is "a verbal act, something we do with words." Nonverbal forms of deception are explicitly excluded from consideration.) The third section is a brief final chapter which presents Augustine's "exceptionless ban of the lie" as the beginning of a theory of community, radically at odds with the assumptions of American capitalist culture. In between, a long second section presents a history of various thinkers on the subject of lying. Griffiths wants to show not only that Augustine was making a break with the existing tradition on this issue but also that the subsequent tradition was not able to maintain the lofty ethical standard set by Augustine.
As a reading of select thinkers and texts, the second section can be anachronistic or misleading. Griffiths' criticism of Plato is basically that he is not a Christian: for the Socrates of the Hippias Minor, "speech is an instrument of service to us, to be used by us for our own purposes; he has no thought that it might be an instrument of praise" or adoration. Christian authors writing after Augustine are, in their turn, found to be inadequately "serious" as Christians, and therefore complicit in bringing about the historical emergence of a secular, Kantian version of justice as the norm in human relations. Even Aquinas, for whom Augustine on this and other topics was so influential, fares poorly, because he speaks of lying in terms of a breach of "justice." Griffiths wrongly sees in this word something that is merely juridical, rational, external, and therefore social. In fact, for Augustine, the Pauline sense of iustitia (righteousness) was precisely the term that summed up his sense of the soul's right relationship to God. Moreover, Aquinas proves himself an Augustinian precisely in his appropriation of an "ontology of participation." The other Christian thinkers that Griffiths examines (Chrysostom, Jerome, Cassian, and Newman) are judged inadequate because he does not find in them anything like an Augustinian anthropology that grounds everything in the soul's relationship to its divine creator.
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