The Work Obligations Do On Us
Further Thoughts on Moral Obligations and God by Way of Lying
This is the fifth in an ongoing series on the nature of moral obligation. Due to many pressing work events this week, this will be the only newsletter this week.—The Management
Last week, I offered five quick theses on the relationship between our obligations and God. In those theses, the frame I laid out is one in which our obligations to God and toward other creatures are not competing options. I take this to be a corollary to the claim that Jesus is the Incarnate Word: to say that Jesus is the Eternal Word Incarnate is to say that the human nature and divine nature of Christ are inseparable, and eternally so. There is no pulling apart what God has joined, and so, there is no pulling apart our obligations as creatures from our lives with God.
Put differently: the greatest two commandments are not one single commandment, but they are the inseparable conditions upon which the Law and the Prophets all hang. To neglect one is to collapse the entire structure. One cannot, Jesus says, neglect your parents and say that you’re doing it for the sake of God, but neither can you offer your bread to the hungry while engaging in idolatry.
I mention all of this because it’s important for us to realize that obligations are not merely external commands, things which must be done: they are those impingements upon our actions which affect who we are. To meet an obligation to our family is to have our lives altered not only in terms of our money and our time, but in terms of what we want, or, what we grow to resent.
Absent this internal element of obligation, talk of obligations can be appear self-referential and circular: Why do we fulfill this obligation? Because we have been commanded to do so. A black hole appears: there is no reason for this behavior apart from divine fiat. We obey because we have been commanded, and reason has little to offer here.
But, when considered from this vantage—the way that our obligations to God and to our neighbors intertwine—we obey because One who is in authority has directed us to perform certain ways. And this opens up an additional aspect which I think some obligation talk (though not all) presumes: that we do certain things—and are rightly obligated to do certain things—because it is fitting for us as humans to do so. We do as asked by God because obedience to God is both a just thing to do (fitting with respect to who God is), but also because obedience is intrinsic to our flourishing as creatures.
All this brings to an interesting question: how is an obligation good for us?
Lying and Obligations
There’s a lot of ways to get at this, but I want to focus on one answer to this question in particular: that obligations are good for us, precisely because not keeping them deforms us. And the question of how this is the case brings us to the story of the 9th commandment.1
There is a very long and very interesting tradition within Christian ethics on the ethics of lying.2 In an equally interesting debate on the September 6th episode of the Mere Fidelity podcast, the hosts took up this question recently: how does Scripture treat the question of truth-telling? In the Old Testament, in particular, there is a deep vein of trickery and of not offering the truth which seems to be commended: the midwives in Egypt, Rahab in Jericho, and several other places. The defense for not telling the truth at all times goes something like this:
The truth is a matter of justice, and so, the unjust are not owed something as precious as the truth; deception can be practiced with the unjust, with the prototype being the serpent in the garden. In this way of thinking, you don’t say to Nazis that you’re sheltering Jews, not only because you’re protecting the Jews but because you don’t owe the Nazis something as precious as the truth. There are consequential reasons to not tell the Nazis the truth—that you’re putting some goods ahead of others (namely, the life of the Jews over the Nazis success)—but to not tell the Nazis the truth because they’re not worthy of the truth raises a different angle here.
In asking the question of whether or not the truth is owed to someone, we’re exiting the realm of consequences—if you tell the truth because of the outcome—and entering the realm of virtue—that the truth is somehow related to the kind of person you are meant to be.
Here, Augustine of Hippo, the 4th-5th century theological behemoth puts forward a pretty straightforward account for lying that feels very alien to most arguments around the implementation of a straightforward obligation like “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” For Augustine, the stakes for bearing false witness are that to bear false witness—whatever the reason—is to place some other kind of good above the good that is God: one might very well benefit socially in all kinds of ways, or create all kinds of good through bearing false witness, but the damage which it does to the soul remains. You are becoming, first in intention and then in habit, a person who lies. He writes: “Either then we are eschew lies by right doing, or to confess them by repenting; but not, while they unhappily abound in our living, to make them more by teaching also…”.3 Put differently, bearing false witness is for avoiding, or repenting of, but not justifying or structuring into our moral calculus.
Beyond False Witness: Commands and The Good Life
This example of whether to bear false witness under certain circumstances invites us to consider that the stakes are raised with respect to our obligations: in keeping the appropriate obligations (in this case, the ones enjoined upon us by God), we become people of the truth, even if in telling the truth, we incur all kinds of consequences for being people of the truth. Another way to think about the objection that the unjust don’t warrant the truth is this: none of us are just, and yet, we are given the truth which we cannot bear in order that we might become just.
The mysteries of that turning from one to another falls beyond the pale of our discussion here, but the point remains: God’s giving of truthfulness is not for upholding an abstracted value called Truth, a value which even God must bend. Rather, it is that in being given something so precious as truthfulness, we are confronted with a pearl of great price, and invited to have our desires, behaviors, plans, and lives fixed around its exercise and goodness.
For Paid Subscribers: we’ll be scheduling (very soon!) a time to talk about Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality. I’ll be emailing all paid subscribers soon to work that out a date for late September/early October again.
Yes, yes, there’s multiple numbering schemes here. Don’t @ me.
For those wanting more, I recommend two sources: 1) Paul Griffiths’ Lying, and 2) Eric Tollefson’s Lying and Christian Ethics.
Contra Mendacium, 41.
As to falsehood for the sake of a good, the falsehood is an evil to itself, because God, the source of all goodness, has told us not to lie. It might even be that the intended good ends get tainted by the evil means - even by sinful means, such as anything that goes against your conscience even if it's not something that God has explicitly called evil. What would you say about this general view, Myles, and, more particularly, about the relationship between conscience and obligation? Isn't a desire to reduce obligation a primary reason that people harden our hearts by burning out our consciences? Is it why empathy is mimicked more than truly felt by many in our culture? Should that German have killed the Nazi at the door instead of lying, because killing murderers is part of God's decree to humanity but lying isn't, even though the vast majority of Worldlings would see the killing as worse than the lie, because of their hard heart against God's actual morality?
Did I ramble? I know taking over the subject in a comment isn't popular. Well, give us an insight or two about all this, please, so my personal declarations on your site reclaim some meaning for everyone, if you will. Oh, how I mourn for the World's strange twisting of things Christ's Church should know!
fascinating thread here. Perhaps my question is only a variation on a threadbare theme, but what if the deceit is itself the practice of courage--resisting the devil incarnated in the evil of killing--and therefore not something that warps or deforms me, but in truth strenghthens in me what might otherwise lay dormant?