Chapter V — How opportune Augustine's teaching is for settling the controversy concerning the deceitful oath will be made plain from the following propositions

I. So that anyone may most easily perceive how opportunely I have prefixed Augustine's teaching against lying, before entering upon the most difficult controversy concerning the deceitful oath, it is worth setting forth beforehand certain general propositions, which are gathered, as it were, in summary, from St. Augustine's teaching, so that I may set them before the readers' eyes by a simple narration. Once I have explained these propositions, in comparison with the teaching of more recent authors, the discourse will return to them below.

II. All the difficulties which more recent writers turn over in their Books concerning equivocations and mental restrictions, and all the cases relevant to practice, St. Augustine brings under examination, both in his Book On Lying, and in that Against Lying. For, at the very beginning of the disputation, he attests that he wishes to institute a discourse concerning those expressions which greatly disturb the mind in daily speech; and he indicates the two chief purposes of his treatment: one, lest anyone wrongly condemn as a lie what is not a lie; the other, lest a lie be ever held lawful. "Great is the question concerning lying, which often disturbs us in our own daily actions; lest we either rashly accuse of lying what is not a lie, or judge that one must sometimes lie for some honorable, officious, and merciful reason" (Book on Lying, ch. 1).

III. The hinge of Augustine's disputation, in the two Books cited above chiefly, turns on this: that reasons be given for the concealment of truth in matters of the highest moment, such as for the preservation of life, of chastity, and for the keeping of secrets. And Augustine himself, with his own divine genius, could find no remedies beyond these which follow. The first is silence: "For most often," he says (Book Against Lying, ch. 10), "we conceal true things, not by lying, but by keeping silent." The other is an open and unconcealed signification, by which someone protests that he knows the truth, but is unwilling to reveal it: "I fear God, I do not betray them. I will neither betray, nor will I lie." No other way of concealing truth did Augustine recognize — not internal restrictions, not material locutions, not amphibologies of words, not other inventions of more recent authors, wherever they may be found.

IV. It is evident that Augustine was altogether ignorant of the doctrine of lying held by very many more recent writers, both his predecessors, and later Fathers, and the very defenders of lying themselves. Indeed, they would have disapproved it as false, on the grounds that they had determined that we cannot conceal truth, except either by silence, or by an open signification of our unwillingness to reveal it, or by lying.

V. No difference at all, as I indeed judge, is repeated in this controversy between Cassian, and other ancient defenders of lying, and certain more recent theologians, except that the ancients called it "lying" when they used a lie in extreme, or most grave, necessity — namely, to conceal a truth of the highest moment, such as for preserving bodily chastity, life, and procuring another's eternal salvation — and asserted this to be lawful. The more recent, by contrast, say for the most part that, in these circumstances, indeed even in far more trivial matters, it is not a lie; but an amphibological, or equivocal, saying, or a restriction — which was formerly called purely mental, is now called external — or, finally, a locution signifying nothing.

VI. All the arguments which more recent writers bring forward in favor of mental restrictions — chiefly those which they draw again from Sacred Scripture — Cassian, along with other Fathers, produced as patrons of his own opinion, to show that lies are lawful.

VII. They said that officious lies were to be employed as extreme remedies for escaping death, for preserving life, for procuring the eternal salvation of one's neighbor, of a worse condition than the opinion of very many more recent writers who defend such lies; for those who defended lies as licit were, in this respect, of a lesser evil condition than those who advocate altogether mental restrictions. Since the latter teach that men can make use of the same, whenever it is useful for the safety of body, honor, and the protection of family affairs — a matter already so defined.

VIII. Some more recent writers, who wrote on mental restrictions after the opinion was condemned by the Church, wrote, as I indeed judge, more loosely, in better judgment, than the ancients, and even than certain other modern patrons of restrictions. Since these latest, most recent writers teach, the proscribed restrictions having been set aside, that men have no need at all of these restrictions; that they need not weary their minds over them, from which these latest, most recent writers free the faithful, salvation always being safe... , indeed do not even torment and rack their brains in hunting out ambiguous words, as Sánchez would have it, nor in fitting equivocal words, or in the very restrictions of mind — as certain patrons of mental restrictions teach, and teach that they must, in order to protect not life, not chastity, but their own family goods, hurl a round "no" in the face of an importunate questioner — namely, that they must deny, absolutely, and without the inconvenience of restriction or equivocation, that they have the sum which the purchaser, seeking to pay, asks about, since then the words signify nothing, and the man speaks as a parrot.

IX. What in the teaching of certain more recent writers seems to me supremely to be deplored is this: that not only do they assert, but even teach, that those locutions which the ancients called lies are not lies — locutions which they themselves call material — and that they can lawfully be confirmed by oath.