In our last post The City of God, we discussed the importance and relevance of Augustine’s book with that title. In this post we consider what other lessons Augustine may have to teach us.
Although the City of God is probably Augustine’s most important book, his best-known work is probably Confessions (“Make me chaste, but not yet!”) Yet, in the context of our Age of Limits, his booklet De Mendacio (On Lying) may be even more meaningful. The book was written around the year 395 CE as part of the larger Retractions. It was followed by Contra Mendacium (Against Lying), written about 25 years later. In De Mendacio Augustine stressed the importance of telling the truth at all times — not even white lies are acceptable.
The following story illustrates the challenge that Augustine faced.
Two men, let’s call them Peter and Paul, live in the same village. They cordially hate one another, and each wishes that the other were dead.
Peter decides to walk to a nearby village, about five miles away. Paul know that there are bandits on the road ― if Peter does make the journey it is likely that he will be attacked, robbed and possibly killed.
Paul faces a dilemma. If he tells Peter about the bandits then it is likely that Peter will assume that Paul is lying because of their mutual hatred. Therefore he, Peter, will decide that the road is actually safe, so he makes the journey. On the other hand, if Paul tells Peter that the road is safe then Peter, not trusting Paul, will decide to stay home.
In this situation, most people would say that Paul is justified in telling a white lie. Augustine would likely have disagreed. He believed that telling a lie endangers one’s soul, and that telling the truth is more important than anything else.
(There is also the possibility that Paul would lie in order to hurt Peter, but then Peter would suspect a lie, and so on and so on.)
Augustine said,
. . . every lie is a sin, albeit there is a great difference depending on the intention and the topic of the lie.
‘Every lie is a sin’. He did not recognize the validity of what we call white lies (although he did recognize that some lies were more sinful than others, and he did accept the lies of the Hebrew midwives). But, for him truthfulness was a basis of his Christian faith.
Telling the truth was particularly important to Augustine and the early Christians because, like us, they lived in a world of propaganda and lies. Ugo Bardi puts it this way.
At the beginning of the 5th century AD, Augustine, bishop of Hippo, wrote his "De Mendacio" ("On Lying"). Reading it today, we may be surprised at how rigid and strict Augustine was in his conclusions. A Christian, according to him, could not lie in any circumstances whatsoever; not even to save lives or to avoid suffering for someone. The suffering of the material body, said Augustine, is nothing; what’s important is one’s immortal soul.
By the time of Augustine, the Roman Empire had become an Empire of lies. It still pretended to uphold the rule of law, to protect the people from the Barbarian invaders, to maintain the social order. But all that had become a bad joke for the citizens of an empire by then reduced to nothing more than a giant military machine dedicated to oppressing the poor in order to maintain the privilege of the few. The Empire itself had become a lie: that it existed because of the favor of the Gods who rewarded the Romans because of their moral virtues. Nobody could believe in that anymore: it was the breakdown of the very fabric of society; the loss of what the ancient called the auctoritas, the trust that citizens had toward their leaders and the institutions of their state.
The people of the Roman Empire knew that they were being lied to so they became cynical. We are living in a similar atmosphere of lies and propaganda, and we also are becoming increasingly cynical. The need for strict truth-telling is as great now as it was in Augustine’s day.
Augustine did not just tell us that we need to tell the truth. He provided guidance as to how we can go about doing this. He said that the starting point is to tell the truth about ourselves. Which is why he wrote Confessions. In it he describes his own faults, weaknesses and failings. His book is not really an autobiography in the modern sense. He was not trying to create a best-selling tabloid for 5th century supermarkets. He is saying that telling the truth starts with telling the truth about oneself.
Of course, it is always important to tell the truth. But, in a time of climate change truth-telling is absolutely vital. In our age of fake news, truthiness and misinformation, telling the truth is a radical act, and needs to be a core part of our theology.