What Augustine Tells Us About Truth
David DeCosse is the director of Campus Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Views are his own.
In a talk at a Vatican conference in 2014, top Trump adviser Stephen Bannon spoke of the need to recover the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of the West in the face of a rampaging capitalism and secularism. Elsewhere he has spoken of the need to connect nationalism with the culture of a nation – and, presumably, he has in mind here what he believes is the underlying Judeo-Christian culture of the American nation.
I’ll leave aside such fundamental questions as whether American culture is distinctly Judeo-Christian. Instead, for the sake of argument, I’ll stipulate that Bannon is correct about this. And, stipulating that, I’d like to ask: How can the call to return to such a Judeo-Christian culture fit with the disregard for the truth on pervasive display in the Trump Administration?
In short, it can’t. And it's important to stop and note this -- both the shocking disregard for the truth by the president and the absolute centrality of truth-telling as the edifice of anything that can be called Judeo-Christian culture (whether it’s Stephen Bannon’s version or anyone else’s).
In his 2014 talk, Bannon spoke of Judeo-Christian values in the context of the truth of seeing economic actors as persons, not widgets. He also argued for the importance of the moral truth of traditional morality represented by things like legal opposition to abortion and gay marriage.
These kinds of convictions do represent Judeo-Christian strands of thought (though there is much dispute among Jews and Christians about these convictions). But all of these convictions are founded on a vivid notion of moral truth. And, in turn, that notion of moral truth is founded on a basic sense of empirical truth.
And here we run into huge contradictions between the Judeo-Christian culture apparently favored by Bannon and the habitual lying of the president, among other manifest samples of deception by the Trump Administration.
Take St. Augustine, one of the greatest figures in the formation of anything that could be called a Christian culture. For Augustine, truth was everything. His reflection on how he could know anything -- how he could say this was true and that was false -- was the practical bedrock on which he began his ascent to God. Without the certainty of the empirical claims of truth – for instance, in a noted recent example, the certainty that the crowds at Obama’s 2009 inauguration were more than twice the size of the crowds at Trump’s 2017 inauguration – it was simply not possible to determine what was either morally or spiritually true. And, for Augustine, God is understood more than anything as Truth.
Because of the great weight Augustine put on the truth, he correspondingly had an absolute opposition to lying. He insisted that even the intentions behind telling a lie can't get you off the hook. The essence of a lie, for Augustine, was its knowing falsity: A speaker uses language or symbols to represent something as true that they know to be false. In turn, this core nature of the wrongfulness of a lie is completed by the intention of a speaker to deceive.
Bannon is a curious character -- obviously smart and a man of convictions but also someone who appears to think that for the sake of radical political change all sorts of lies are tolerable.
But the rampant lies of the president and his team are in direct contradiction to the most fundamental aspects of the Judeo-Christian tradition. So long as Bannon countenances such lying, he contradicts that tradition as well.
Photo credit: Sandro Botticelli [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
