The greatest sin?

Lying

An Augustinian Theology of Duplicity

Paul J. Griffiths

Brazos Press, $18.99, 254 pp.

Paul Griffiths's book on lying has been highly praised by several eminent Christian scholars and, in measure, it clearly deserves such praise. His exposition of Augustine's metaphysics, for example, is a model of lucid and systematic analysis. More important is that the main theme of the book, which is vigorously argued, is of great interest. Very broadly stated, the theme is that lying is wrong in all circumstances. Saving the life of an innocent person, protecting a woman from rape, comforting the dying--even lies attended by such consequences as these are entirely unjustified. This was Augustine's view, and Griffiths agrees unreservedly.

As everyone knows, Augustine did not consider it wrong in all circumstances to wage war. If there can be a just war, why can't there be a just lie? What gives lying so special a status among sins? Augustine's (and Griffiths's) answer is that lying distorts the image of the Trinity in the soul of the liar, and in this way is an offense, not primarily against those to whom the lie is told, but against God. The Trinity is constituted by a divine act of speech, the begetting of the Son, or the Word. When a man or woman speaks the truth, an analogous act is accomplished. The possibility of such an act is a divine gift, bestowed when someone is permitted by God to see and voice the truth. To lie, however, which Griffiths (following Augustine) defines as deliberate duplicity, is to reject the gift. More precisely, it is to take the truth into one's own possession as though it were not a gift but something one might keep and use for selfish purposes. To misuse the gift in this way is to mutilate the image in oneself of the Holy Trinity. This, as I understand it, is the gist of Griffiths's argument.

The idea that speaking truthfully is reproducing the image of the Trinity in oneself cannot but be of compelling interest to all Christians, and Griffiths argues it at length and quite convincingly. Does it follow, though, that speaking falsely, and doing this knowingly, is in all circumstances sinful? Griffiths maintains that it is, and he is bold and honest enough to press his argument to its most implausible extremes. Thus on the next-to-last page of the book he asks you to imagine that you are navigator of a warplane carrying a nuclear bomb which the pilot has been ordered to drop on a large city, incinerating perhaps a million people. You can avert this catastrophe by giving the pilot false coordinates, that is, by lying. Should you lie? Griffiths acknowledges that some of the greatest names in philosophy and theology, including Plato, Aristotle, Chrysostom, Aquinas, and Newman (these and others are discussed at some length in the second part of the book) would all say yes, you should in those circumstances lie. Most readers, surely, would say yes. Griffiths, however, says no. "The consistent Augustinian," he asserts, "cannot lie to save innocent life, whether one or a million."

Most people will recoil in horror from the thought of someone who will let a million lives be lost, in utmost agony, for the sake of his own supposed moral purity. What kind of divine image can there be in someone willing to do that? But such horror is a feeling, not an argument, and Griffiths readily admits that the Augustinian view runs counter to our feelings. It is decidedly counter-intuitive. So the question is how to get beyond feelings. Here I can only suggest ways of doing this.

To begin with, there is a vital distinction which Griffiths does not seem steadily to keep in mind. This is the distinction between effecting an evil and committing a sin. These are clearly not the same. Violence is an evil, as almost everyone acknowledges, yet employing violence is not in all circumstances a sin. Only anarchists and pacifists maintain the contrary. Griffiths asserts that "since Augustine thinks that no sin ought ever to be committed, the conclusion that no lie ought ever to be told is unavoidable." But aside from the fact that the proposition that no sin ought ever to be committed is merely analytic, since a sin can be properly defined as an act that ought never to be committed, the inference--that lying is always wrong--begs the question. It assumes that lying is always sinful, whereas that is the point at issue. This exemplifies Griffiths's seeming failure to keep steadily in mind that inflicting an evil is not in all circumstances sinful. A lie, like an act of violence, is always evil. But is it always sinful?

At this point Griffiths would probably summon his (and Augustine's) Trinitarian theory of truth telling and lying. Lying deranges the divine image in the human soul. It is therefore a sin of unique character and gravity. But the Bible doesn't seem to say this. The primal sin, that of Adam and Eve, was disobeying God, not lying. Moreover, one may ask whether all sins aren't sins against God. In Psalm 51, often read as David's plea for divine mercy after arranging for the death of Bathsheba's husband, the Psalmist confesses to God, "Against thee, thee only have I sinned." And if God is love, isn't every offense against one's neighbor, every failure to love one's neighbor, a derangement in oneself of the divine image? And isn't the image thus deranged precisely that of the Trinity? Begetting the Son, or speaking the Word, is the pattern not only of all truth telling but of all loving action. It is the pattern of going out from oneself toward the other. Griffiths comes close to recognizing this when he writes that "all sin is a lie." It is hard to see how he can quite mean this because he ordinarily treats lying as exclusively a speech act, and even says explicitly that it is. But assuming that he does mean "all sin is a lie," doesn't he grant that lying is not a distinctive sin? Even if paradigmatic, Griffiths suggests, it is like all sins. But this only renews the question: If effecting evil is not always sinful, why is lying always sinful?

It is doubtful that the Augustinian case against lying can be sustained except on the basis of a much more thoroughgoing analysis of consequentialism than is found in Lying. Griffiths condemns all attacks on Augustine's position as consequentialist. That is valid, for arguing that a lie is justified in some circumstances is arguing that its consequences have a decisive bearing on its moral status. But is consequentialism in all forms an untenable moral position? Not very clearly. It is not the same as moral relativism. It is not necessarily nihilistic. It does not deny that there is an absolute good, namely God, nor does it deny that there are numerous created goods, such as persons and other living creatures, which are also absolute in their goodness even though they are finite. It denies only that there are absolute rules of conduct, rules demanding obedience in every situation. And it does this on behalf of the notion that we cannot live in the world without calculating consequences whenever we act. And, one might add, whenever we speak: to exclude duplicitous speech from consequentialist considerations is, for a speaking animal whose common life is woven in large part with threads of speech, to set a large sphere of life outside the world.

In what I take to be an effort to avoid consequentialist calculations, Griffiths asserts that Augustine held we can always avoid sin by refusing to act. But surely not. Refusing to act has consequences that cannot be ignored. Bonhoeffer knew that he could not remain a righteous main in Nazi Germany simply through passivity and silence. Moral integrity required action. And (granting that Bonhoeffer's concept of lying was complex, and not simply the opposite of Augustine's) the action required--as in the Gestapo interrogations Bonhoeffer endured--was what Augustine and Griffiths would count as lying.

The first sentence of Griffiths's book is: "Lies bind the fabric of every human life." The examples that follow--the things we say in reprimanding our children, in confessing our sins, in writing memoirs, in conversation at cocktail parties--make clear his meaning, namely, that lies bind the fabric of social life. To be "imaginatively masked, adorned with the lie" he says is "the very mark of adult humanity." This implies that abolishing lying would constitute a social revolution. In addition, it would constitute a political revolution, for it is safe to say that someone resolved never to lie, never to engage in any form of verbal duplicity, could not take part in politics as we know it. Griffiths to some degree faces these implications in concluding his book, and suggests that the end of lying would spell the end of democracy, with the political deceptiveness it entails, and of capitalism, with its advertising. This is a brief and passing glance at a beast that could, if not slain, devour Griffiths's whole argument. An argument involving sweeping, ill-defined, and implausible implications, such as the transformation of society, is imperiled by those implications. They have to be faced far more resolutely and explicitly than Griffiths faces them, particularly when a thinker with as little interest in social transformation as Augustine is at the center of the discussion.

I do not say this altogether in criticism of Griffiths. His case against lying is a large and important argument, more important than he may, in view of his neglect of social and political implications, have fully realized himself. The argument is carried on tenaciously and clearly. Some readers will probably find it convincing, although I do not. Still, I have no hesitation in saying that practically all readers will find the argument worthy of attention.

 Statue Freestanding

Hollows: the form within the form.
How is it that out of the frieze
the body is still dependent--
even in contrapposto appealing to the air?
I pledge to learn this inverse of expression,
to weigh each lifted arch against its death.
May we not fall,

but let the light
hold us a moment in its easy arms.
May we stay a little the grave weight
of fetishes and laurel.
May we not rise.

Anne Coray

Glenn Tinder is the author of Can We Be Good Without God: On The Political Meaning of Christianity (Regent College) and other books.