St Augustine, On Lying

Today we will learn and reflect on St Augustine’s Treatise On Lying. St Augustine first
wrote a treatise AGAINST LYING, but he was unhappy with his treatment of this
troublesome sin, so he tried again in a newer work that we will study, ON LYING, or
De Mendacio in Latin. This is one of St Augustine’s many works that have been
quoted in the Catholic Catechism.
Since St Augustine was a bishop tending to his flock rather than the abbot of a
monastery overseeing unmarried monks who through daily asceticism and prayer
seek to lead a more perfect life, his advice is often more practical than that of the
monastics.

At the end of our talk, we will discuss the sources used for this video, and the
additional lessons we learn from these sources, and my blogs that also cover this
topic. Please, we welcome interesting questions in the comments, sometimes
these generate short videos of their own. Let us learn and reflect together!

YouTube Video:
St Augustine: On Lying
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Saint Augustine, by Carlo Cignani, 1600’a
St Augustine opens his book On Lying, “There is a great
question about LYING,” which confronts us every day, and
that is whether “we rashly call a lie that which is not,” or
decide whether a white lie can “be a kind of honest, well-
meant charitable lie.”
To answer this question we face daily, we must search our
motives, whether our words are spoken “to any good
purpose.”
Can we be sure our motives are pure? “This discussion is
full of dark corners and cavern-like windings, which eludes
the eagerness of the seeker,” for even charitable lying, if
there is such a thing, is a spiritually dangerous thing.
St Augustine says that you “never err more safely than
you love the truth in excess, and be eager to reject
falsehood.”
St Augustine in his Retractions says that he wrote this
book to “inculcate the love of speaking the truth.”

When we ponder this question we should ponder with St
Augustine the actions of the Hebrew midwives in Egypt in
Exodus:

The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives,
one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other
Puah, “When you act as midwives to the Hebrew
women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a
boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live.” But
the midwives feared God; they did not do as the
king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the
boys live. So the king of Egypt summoned the
midwives and said to them, “Why have you done
this, and allowed the boys to live?” The midwives
said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are
not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous
and give birth before the midwife comes to
them.” So God dealt well with the midwives; and
the people multiplied and became very
strong. And because the midwives feared God, he
gave them families. Pharaoh and the Midwives, James Tissot c. 1900

Did the Hebrew midwives sin when they told this lie to
Pharaoh? Did the Hebrew midwives lie?
Many thousands of Jews were saved from the Holocaust
by lies of this sort, many people helped hide Jews and
paid with their lives, several diplomats issued thousands
of passports permitting Jews to emigrate to avoid the
death camps, and we all know the story of Oscar
Schindler who lied constantly to the Nazis to save his
Jewish workers.

What is odd about St Augustine mentioning the benevolent lies
of the Hebrew midwives is he also mentions two other instances
where the patriarchs lied that may not be as clear cut.

Abraham, Sarah, and three angels, by Domenico Fiasella, 17th century
As St Augustine tells us, “in the
case of Sarah, who, when she had
laughed (when she was told she
would bear a child at such an
advanced age), denied to the
angels that she had laughed.”

St Augustine says that
these “lies told by
persons whom you
would not dare to
blame, and so we must
conclude that it may
sometimes be not only
blameworthy, but even
praiseworthy to tell a
lie.”
Isaac blessing Jacob,
Gerrit Willemsz Horst,
circa 1638
St Augustine continues, “in the
case of Jacob being questioned
by his father, and answering that
he was the elder son Esau”
(robbing him of his birth right).

But though it may be praiseworthy to lie to
save the life of another, it is never
praiseworthy to lie to save your own life,
particularly to the detriment of your
neighbor. St Augustine reminds us that Christ
exhorts us, “This is my commandment, that
you love one another as I have loved you. No
man has a great love than this, that a man
would lay down his life for his friends.”
In all his major works, St Augustine always
teaches us of the centrality of the two-fold
Love of God and love of our neighbor.
St. Augustine by Peter Paul Rubens,
painted 1636 - 1638

Perhaps St Augustine has in mind the adventures of Odysseus in
his ten-year Odyssey returning home from the Trojan Wars,
when he says, “for if a person who is used to telling lies for
harm’s sake comes to tell them for the sake of doing good, that
person has made great progress.” In that tale, the goddess
Athena is simply amused by the long and complex false history
Odysseus tells of his wanderings and lineage, craftiness that has
kept him alive while the gods condemned the many men in his
crew for their foolishness and lack of self-control.

Giuseppe Bottani - Ulysses transformed by
Athena into beggar, painted 1775
Homer: “As Odysseus spoke,
the goddess, clear-eyed
Athena, smiled and patted
him with her hand. Her
form grew like a woman’s,
fair and tall and skilled in
fine work, and speaking in
winged words she said,
‘Prudent and wily must one
be to overreach you in craft
of any kind, even though it
be a god who strives to
match you. Bold, shifty, and
wily, will you not now within
your own land cease from
the false and misleading
tales which from the bottom
of your heart you love?’“

The implication is this loving of lying is spiritually dangerous.
St Augustine then provides the common situation when we may
choose not to tell the truth to a gravely sick man, for fear that
his health would worsen if we told him some uncomfortable and
emotionally damaging truth, if such a psychic blow could
prevent him from recovering his health.

Commandment DO NOT SLANDER
CCC 2482 Quotes On Lying to say that a “lie consists of speaking a
falsehood with the intention of deceiving,” which in our translation is
rendered, “a lie is any utterance whatever with will to deceive.”
The Lord denounces lying as the work of the devil: "You are of your father
the devil, . . . there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according
to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.“ John 8:44

St Augustine teaches us, “there is a
difference between lying and being a liar. A
man may tell a lie unwittingly; but a liar loves
to lie, and inhabits in his mind the delight of
lying.” Have you ever met or ever seen on TV
someone who lies so much he can’t hardly
say anything that is undeniably true?
Lying is hazardous to your soul, St Augustine
quotes Wisdom of Solomon 1:11 in several
places in this work:
“Beware of useless murmuring,
and keep your tongue from slander;
because no secret word will go unpunished,
and a lying mouth destroys the soul.”
Saint Augustine, by Antonio Rodríguez,
1636-1691

St Augustine dislikes lying as much as he dislikes liars, and if he is compelled to
justify lying in any circumstance, he ardently wants the exception to be so narrow
as to be unattainable as possible. Perhaps he fears that if he opens the barn door
a crack a herd of cattle will barge through, such is our propensity to sin and
deceive, as all sin involves deception. But God did bless and reward the Hebrew
midwives for their actions.
What is always in the mind of St Augustine as he ponders this riddle? What should
always be in all of our minds? “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” How is
this possible? St Augustine teaches us that to love our neighbor we must truly love
ourselves, we must Love God, but how can we truly love ourselves if we have a
lying mouth that destroys our soul? “Good men should never tell lies.”

ST AUGUSTINE EXAMINES THE VARIOUS TYPES OF LIES
When someone says something that it is not true out of ignorance, believing that it
is true, then this is not counted as a lie because there is no intention to lie.
The martyrs to the faith were in living memory of some Christians in St Augustine’s
day. These early martyrs were glorified by the church when they were martyred
for their faith, for their refusal to bear false witness against Christ and deny their
faith. But what if the authorities also threatened to kill their father as well if they
did not deny Christ? Should they deny Christ to prevent the murder of their
father? These were hard choices the early Christians had to make.
Even if we think a lie is harmless, it harms our soul. Beware of lying, be cautious in
telling white lies, do we prefer pleasing people over telling the truth? What about
the person whose lies benefits someone rather than harms them? That sort of lie
still damages the soul.

Martyrdom of Saint Livinus, Rubens, 1635
Crucifixion of Saint Peter, by Michelangelo, circa 1550

Saint Augustine in His Study by
Sandro Botticelli, 1494, Uffizi Gallery
What about the Robin Hood argument? “What
harm does it do to someone rolling in wealth
who loses one bushel out of a thousand” to a
thief who needs that one bushel to keep him
from starving? You can be merciful to the thief,
but he still sinned.
But “it is no sin if a man hide his property which
he fears to lose,” but that is not really lying but
discretion. This is especially true when you do
not reveal where your neighbor’s treasure is
hidden when asked by a thief. No harm is done
when a thief is not tempted to thievery.

We see in the story of Ruth gleaning wheat in the fields of Boaz,
and in the Biblical laws requiring that Israeli landowners leave
the leftover wheat in the harvest for the poor to glean, the
principal that we should be kind to the poor, so they are not
forced to steal to survive.

Ruth and Boaz, by George Frederic Watts, 1837
Ruth in Field with Boaz, by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, circa 1828

By the same logic the landlord that hid Anne Frank with her
Jewish family in the attic and lied to the Gestapo when they
knocked on his door asking where the Jews were hiding, he did
not sin when he told them he did not know where they were,
knowing they would be driven like cattle to the death camps. St
Augustine teaches that this is not false witness because the
Gestapo were not searching for witnesses when they knocked on
the door looking for Jews, they were searching for betrayers.

In these last two circumstances St Augustine
teaches that “the question is no longer about
lying, but whether an injury ought to be done to
any man.”
St Augustine teaches that we must “guard our
chastity of mind, when we love our neighbor, we
guard our innocence and benevolence, when we
Love God, we guard our piety. Through innocence
we harm no man, through benevolence we do
good to whom we can, through piety we worship
God.” This happens when we refuse to bear false
witness against our neighbor, this happens when
we learn to love to speak the truth of our
neighbor, this happens when we do not seek to
harm our neighbor, but rather seek to love our
neighbor as ourselves.
Saint Augustine, by Philippe de
Champaigne, painted 1650

SOURCES used for our video include the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers
translation of Faith and the Creed, First Series, Volume 3.
This Treatise is in the collection of the moral treatises, On the Trinity is the
first treatise in the collection, and the collection also includes On the
Catechizing the Uninstructed and on the Faith and the Creed, for which we
also have recorded a video. Since St Augustine mentions this treatise in his
Retractions, and since it is included in the index of works he prepared shortly
before he died, that it was definitely penned by St Augustine.

To find the source of any direct
quotes in this blog, please type in
the phrase to the search box in
my blog to see the referenced
footnote.
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St Augustine, On Lying

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