Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (145 page)

The question about whether lies could be deemed moral was entertained by Speyer:

As noted already, it is the intent to deceive that lies beyond any particular literary purpose that makes a pseudepigraphon a forgery. Forgery and lie agree in this regard, that they conceal the real situation and give the appearance of truth to a non-existent state of affairs. To this end, they use the means of dissimulation. Literary forgery is thus a special case of the lie, or rather: of deceit. This relationship between literary forgery and lie does not appear, however, to
have been examined closely in antiquity or the modern era.… We must ask, however, whether in antiquity any lie would have been judged unethical, or whether there were differentiations, and deception was considered permissible in certain cases.
¹⁶

To ask what ancient persons—even orthodox Christians among the highly educated literary elite—thought about lying would be like asking this question of modern people. It depends on whom you ask. For the purposes of this sketch, I will map out two of the extreme positions, the well-known Augustinian view that it was never, ever right to lie, about anything, at any time, for any reason, whatsoever, and the lesser known but (at the time) more popular view represented by his contemporary John Cassian, that in fact there were instances where lying was not only acceptable but in fact the right thing to do.
¹⁷

Augustine’s views of lying can be found scattered throughout his writings, but come to clearest expression in his two treatises devoted to the subject,
De mendacio
and
Contra mendacium.
¹⁸
The overarching point is the same in both treatises:
under no circumstances is it permissible for a Christian to lie. You can imagine the most extreme position you want—that a white lie may prevent someone from being raped and tortured to death—and it is still not right to lie, no matter what.

De mendacio and Contra mendacium

De mendacio
provides a long and nuanced discussion of what a lie actually is, followed by the question of whether it is ever appropriate or permissible for a Christian to tell a lie. For Augustine, a lie is the intentional discrepancy between what a person thinks to be true (whether or not she is right) and the contrary thing she says. A person “lies … who holds one opinion in his mind and who gives expression to another through words or any other outward manifestation” (
ch. 3
).
¹⁹
As Paul Griffiths puts it, for Augustine the mark of a
mendacium
is duplicity: that is, “a fissure between thought and utterance that is clearly evident to the speaker as she speaks. Lying words are spoken precisely with the intent to create such a fissure.” So the speaker of the lie, the
mendax
has to believe that what she is saying is false, and to be intentionally saying it anyway (whether or not it really is false is beside the point).
²⁰
Or more simply: “For Augustine, the lie is deliberately duplicitous speech, insincere speech that deliberately contradicts what its speaker takes to be true.”
²¹

Augustine is well aware of instances in the Bible where important figures lie with apparent approbation: Sarah and Jacob in Genesis, the Egyptian midwives at the beginning of Exodus. But he insists that these passages demand a figurative, not a literal, interpretation; and he finds no lies among Jesus or his followers in the New Testament. In his view, not only is there no biblical warrant for lying; there is no warrant whatsoever. He gets to this point by a kind of argumentum ad absurdum: no one would commend fornication in order to attain a greater good; and lying is condemned in Scripture just as much as fornication. One should not try to imagine a hypothetical situation in which a lie would ever bring about the ultimate, greatest good possible—for example, the eternal life of another. For one who proclaims the gospel with a lie undercuts the truth of the gospel, and if a person cannot trust a Christian who is telling a lie for the sake of his salvation, then he would have no grounds for trusting him with respect to the message of salvation itself: “When regard for truth has been broken down or even slightly weakened, all things will remain doubtful, and unless these are believed to be true, they cannot be considered as certain” (ch. 17). “When all aspects of the problem of lying have been considered, it is clear that the testimony of the Holy Scriptures advises that one should never lie at all” (ch. 42). “Whoever thinks, moreover, that there is any kind of lie which is not a sin deceives himself sadly when he considers that he, a deceiver of others, is an honest man” (ch. 42).

Augustine’s hard line continues in the
Contra mendacium
. This tractate was occasioned by a somewhat unusual situation. The heretical Priscillians had argued that lies were sometimes not only acceptable, but commendable. An orthodox leader, Consentius, was willing to pretend to accept Priscillian teachings (a kind of lie) in order to infiltrate the group and expose them as heretics. For Augustine, even such commendable ends do not justify the use of deception. As he asks rhetorically, “Therefore, how can I suitably proceed against lies by lying?” (
ch. 1
). Augustine goes on to maintain that if duplicitous concealment were licit, Christ would have told his sheep to dress in wolves’ clothing, so as to discover the wolves; instead, they are told to beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing (
ch. 12
). For Augustine, the teaching of Scripture is plain: God will destroy
all
who lie, not just some (see Psalm 5:6–7).

Moreover, if lying were ever appropriate, the martyrs to the faith would have been completely justified in lying to avoid torture and death. But they did not lie, for they realized that something is far worse than temporary torture and physical death: it is eternal torment and spiritual death, which comes to all those who willfully sin (
ch. 3
). And so, for Augustine, “Of course, it makes a difference for what reason, for what end, with what intention anything is done. But, those things which are clearly sins ought not to be done under any pretext of a good reason, for any supposedly good end, with any seemingly good intention” (ch. 18). His ultimate conclusion:

You must hold and firmly defend the contention that in matters of divine religion we ought never to lie at all. Just as we do not seek out hidden adulterers by adultery or homicides by homicide or sorcerers by sorcery, so we should not seek out liars by lying or blasphemers by blasphemy. (ch. 41)

Similar Perspectives

It is sometimes overlooked that Augustine needed to argue so vociferously for his position on lying precisely because most Christians took a different view. As Griffiths points out, Augustine may have been the first thinker in the Christian religion to give a systematic treatment of the two big questions about lying: what a lie is, and whether it is ever permissible. But “few Christians agreed with him when he wrote.”
²²

There were some who did, however. And so, Lactantius, writing against the poet Lucilius, who implied that whereas one should never lie to one’s friends, it was acceptable to lie to one’s enemies, could state:

The other things which the worshiper of God ought to observe are easy when those virtues have been attained. For he would never lie for the sake of deceiving or harming. It is wrong for him who is eager for the truth to be false in
any respect and to depart from that very truth which he follows. In this way of justice and of all virtues, there is no place for a lie.… Nor will he ever commit the crime of having his tongue, “the interpreter of the mind,” at variance with his feeling and intention.
²³

So too Eusebius, in the
Preparatio:

A mortal man who paid any little regard to virtue would never lie but would choose rather to reverence the truth; nor would he lay the blame of a lie upon any necessity of fate or course of the stars. But even if anyone were to bring fire or sword against his body, to compel him to pervert the word of truth, yet even against this he would reply in freedom’s tone:

“Come fire, come sword;
Burn, and scorch up this flesh, and gorge thyself
With my dark blood; for sooner shall the stars
Sink down to earth, and earth rise up to heav’n
Than fawning word shall meet thee from my lips.” (6.6)
²⁴

This hard-core view of lying as never, ever permissible ran up against a much more popular view, embraced by non-Christian and Christian authors alike, that there were indeed circumstances under which it was not only permissible but commendable to engage in lies and other forms of deceit. As Speyer and, especially, Norbert Brox have recognized, this ancient Christian attitude may well explain the willingness of many anonymous literati to forge documents in the names of others, lying about their identity in order to convey what they understood to be the truth.
²⁵
This contrary view can be seen in a relatively clear form in a key passage of John Cassian’s
Conferences
, in which he recounts a late sleepless night conversation in the desert between Abba Germanus and Abba Joseph (the words are those of Joseph; they appear to represent Cassian’s own view as well, but whether they do or not is immaterial to the point).

Abba Joseph insists that it is sometimes the right thing to do to lie, but one must use supreme caution and circumspection:

And so a lie is to be thought of and used as if it were hellebore. If it is taken when a deadly disease is imminent it has a healthful effect, but taken when
there is no urgent need it is the cause of immediate death. For we read that even men who were holy and most approved by God made such good use of lying that they not only did not commit sin thereby but even acquired the highest righteousness. If deceit were capable of conferring glory on them, would truth, on the other hand, have brought them anything but condemnation?
²⁶

Joseph cites the story of Rahab from the book of Joshua. Had she spoken the truth when asked where the Israelite spies were hiding, they could not have done her a favor later, and spared her family or her, and she would never, then, have become one of the progenitors of Christ himself (in fact, the messianic line then would have been broken). Contrast that with Delilah who disastrously spoke the truth and as a result “obtained everlasting perdition in exchange for this, and left to everyone nothing but the memory of her sin.” Joseph’s conclusion: “When some grave danger is connected with speaking the truth, therefore, the refuge of lying must be resorted to (yet in such a way that we are bitten by the healthful guilt of a humbled conscience.)” But that is acceptable before God, who ““perceives the inner devotion of the heart and judges not the sound of the words but the intent of the will, because it is the end of the work and the disposition of the doer that must be considered.” In sum: “One person can be justified even when lying, whereas another can commit a sin deserving everlasting death by telling the truth.”

A sharper contrast to the Augustinian view can scarcely be imagined (except one that insisted that lying was
always
the moral thing!). But Cassian was not inventing an ethics of lying out of whole cloth. On the contrary, he was standing in a long and noble line of ethical thinking that can be traced back for centuries. In pagan circles, it is most famously associated with the great Socrates himself.
²⁷

According to Xenophon, Socrates taught that there were certain situations in which lying was not only permissible but appropriate. This is the case, for example, when a general “seeing that his army is downhearted, tells a lie and says that reinforcements are approaching, and by means of this lie checks discouragement among the men.” So too, in a yet better known and much repeated example, lying is proper if “a man’s son refuses to take a dose of medicine when he needs it, and the father induces him to take it by pretending that it is food, and cures him by
means of this lie” (
Memorab
. 4, 2, 14–18).
²⁸
This idea of a “medicinal” lie became a commonplace in ancient ethical discourse. It recurs on Socrates’s lips in Plato’s “Republic.”

Plato’s own views of lying, as with most of his views on most things, are very difficult to ascertain, given the nature of his dialogues and the logic of his dialectical methods. But the various positions championed at one point or another in the dialogues—whether they are the historical Plato’s actual views or others’ that he sees either as false or only as partly true—are almost always views that were seen as “acceptable” to some of his ancient Greek readers.

There is a good deal of discourse on lying in the “Republic.” For example, at 382c-d, Socrates declares that it is acceptable to lie to one’s enemies, to one’s friends in order to prevent them from doing harm to themselves, and in fables and myths designed to lead a person to the truth. Best known, however, is Socrates’s proposal of the “noble lie” that was to help sustain the proper leadership and ordered society of his Republic. In building his case for the noble lie, Socrates begins by insisting that lying is sometimes the proper thing to do, with recourse to the idea of the medicinal lie:

But further we must surely prize truth most highly. For if we were right in what we were just saying and falsehood is in very deed useless to gods, but to men useful as a remedy or form of medicine, it is obvious that such a thing must be assigned to physicians, and laymen should have nothing to do with it” [and who, for Plato, are the “physicians” who can dole out the medicinal lie? The enlightened rulers of the state, who are all trained in philosophy]. “The rulers then of the city may, if anybody, fitly lie on account of enemies or citizens for the benefit of the state: no others may have anything to do with it.” (389b)
²⁹