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.

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.

It is questionable whether Augustine offers the only feasible model of a theological or "relational" anthropology. Regardless, in the first section, Griffiths does a nice job of laying out his interpretation of Augustine's basic theological ideas in a lucid and accessible manner. This is no small feat. Griffiths begins by explaining how Augustine presents an orthodox understanding of creation in the speculative language available to him. All things, he explains, have their being insofar as they "participate" in God in some manner. This means that God is the cause of the being of all things: created things are certainly "other" than God; they have both their origin and their ongoing subsistence and well-being as a result of God's abiding providential care. Griffiths means to highlight the radical sense of dependency of the creature upon the Creator (as opposed to any sense of "autonomy"), and therefore emphasize creation as a gift: "To think of things independently of thinking about God is therefore to fall short of thinking about things as they are, for they are only in terms of God and by gift of God."

A consequence of this view of creation is a hierarchical picture of the cosmos. Everything made by God is good, but some things are "more good" than others: spiritual goods are of greater value than earthly goods; creatures endowed with reason claim a higher order of "participation" in the life of God than animals or plants, and so on. For Augustine, sin enters the picture when a "lesser good" is mistaken for a higher good: more precisely, when a created good is mistaken for God. This is idolatry. Sin by this account is a confusion about the proper order of things, and therefore the proper way in which things should be loved. All created things exist for the purpose of turning our hearts to God as their origin and ours. When we take something such as money or worldly prestige as an end worth seeking for its own sake, we make that thing into a god. The act of sinning is therefore its own punishment, Griffiths says (echoing Dante and many Christian moralists before him); what is intended to satisfy does not, and cannot, and we are inevitably unhappy. Eve, he says, knows perfectly well that the apple will taste like ashes, nor will it fill her belly.

Sin is therefore a kind of deception, even if it is actively desired. Griffiths links this to language, making lying a paradigm for sin in general. Even more, he makes it the ur-Sin from which all other sin derives. This move requires a rhetorical misconstrual of Augustine's larger project.

Griffiths is certainly right that an Augustinian anthropology must begin with the biblical assertion that man is created in the image of God. It does not follow, however, that certain indubitable clues of the divine handiwork are inscribed in the nature of the soul. For Augustine, the soul's ability to image God is, first, purely potential and, second, a product of the soul's graceful incorporation in an ever-growing relationship with the Father. The likeness to God that is given in the first creation of man is disfigured by sin; as habit tends to become nature (so Aquinas learns from Augustine), that likeness is effectively lost. It is the mediation of grace through Christ that begins and finishes its restoration.

Griffiths focuses on a particular text toward the end of Augustine's monumental treatise De Trinitate, in which an incarnational element of the "imago Dei" doctrine is developed. Man reflects the incarnate Christ in that he thinks by conceiving a mental (i.e., pre-verbal) "inner word"; by speaking, he utters this word, his thought, in the fleshly garb of language. Griffiths is justified in looking to this particular text, but he is not justified in linking it to the conclusion of the text On Lying and making it the entire paradigm both for what it "means" to be made in the image of God and therefore what it "means" to sin.

To criticize this move fairly, one should offer a detailed, textually sensitive account of what Augustine is talking about when he speaks of this "inner word." I will spare the reader any such attempt. Augustine warns at the beginning of De Trinitate that we must always look to find the image of the whole Trinity in man, and not only the image of one of the persons. The Trinity includes an incarnational dimension. Indeed, this is fundamental. But looking at the whole text on this subject, one can only conclude that the ability to verbalize concepts is a minute component. My criticism of Griffiths is simply that he is reading particular texts of Augustine completely out of their context.

It is true that all sin for Augustine involves a certain breach of relationship between man and the God in whose image he is made. But not all sin can be reduced to the paradigm of the lie, in which a person thinks one thing and utters something else. Acts of sin are often more subtle, precisely because they involve a measure of self-deception.

Indeed there are differences in kinds of sin and their gravity: Augustine does allow such distinctions to abide, even as he emphasizes the sinfulness of lying in principle. Griffiths' analysis of Augustine's view of creation and sin is forcefully argued, and subsequent chapters in the first section of the book, on "Speaking," "Disowning," and "Storytelling," offer some valuable insights into Augustine's thinking on the morality of speech. But Griffiths verges on reductionism as he collapses the hierarchy of created goods into a murky realm of actual or potential sin, and makes every act of deliberation about temporal matters a prideful choice of one's judgment over the will of God. True enough, Scripture says that "all men are liars": the fact of sin is not an issue for Augustine. It is not, however, the last word on spiritual progress in this lifetime, nor is it the sole factor determining the outcome of decision-making. Augustine's ontology of dependence does not entail moral paralysis.

Some have argued that Augustine is guilty of a vicious dualism that is the result of his ancient philosophical heritage: an opposition of the spiritual and the temporal, a general mistrust of physical reality, and unhealthy sort of renunciation of worldly pleasures and duties. I would not come to this conclusion. A reader of Griffiths' book might, in part because he has used an early work, the circulation of which Augustine had reservations about, as a lens through which to view his entire moral theology. Missing from Griffiths' book is any sense of the life of Christ as a gradual transformation of the soul into something more like God: a rich sense of the sanctifying power of grace, or of the life of the Church and its sacraments as a way of humility, forgiveness, and growth.

Griffiths challenges the Church to live according to the "exceptionless ban of the lie." In the end, I do not find such a ban predominating in any aspect of Augustinian theology, nor is it the case that, for Augustine, moral dilemmas present themselves as a clear choice between the voice of God and the "comfortable" deceits of our conscience. Griffiths asks whether we see our speech as something that is used "for us" or for God. If it is for God, Griffiths believes, it will be for the kind of truth that he identifies in the De mendacio. But Augustine, in his Confessions, seeks to move beyond a dichotomy in which public and private interests are opposed. The Church, he believes, as founded on the principles of humility and sacrifice of self for the sake of unity, can and must encompass a multitude of persons and positions, so long as all agree to be subject to the authority of faith in Christ.

Paige Hochschild received her Ph.D. in theology this spring from the University of Durham. Her dissertation is entitled "Memory in the Theological Anthropology of St. Augustine."

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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