Living a Truthful Life

by C. T. Maier

When I was about seven years old, I found a pebble in the driveway. Smooth and white, it looked, to my amazement, every bit like a molar. I took my find to my mother.

A sudden mischievousness took me by surprise. “Look mom! I lost a tooth,” I fibbed with a wily grin.

Not that I wanted to trick anyone. I expected my mom to take one look at the pebble in my palm and laugh with me. But to my surprise, she took me at my word and told me to put it under my pillow for the tooth fairy.

My stomach suddenly turned. I had lied, and my mother had trusted me so easily. Had I undermined that trust? I didn’t mean to.

I came clean, and I learned a lesson about how easy—and tempting—lying can be. We know that lying is wrong, plain and simple. But we also know that lying is something everyone faces. So, how do we live a truthful life?

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that the Eighth Commandment “forbids misrepresenting the truth in our relations with others” (no. 2464). We believe in a God of truth, and we believe that we are called to respect and bear witness to that truth. Jesus says the truth sets us free. It sanctifies us (no. 2466). Without the truth, we cannot live a holy life. And without a holy life, we can never be the people God wants us to be.

The effects of constant lying are incremental, slow, inexorable, and devastating. In Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, Harvard professor Sissela Bok observes that some of the worst victims of lies are the liars themselves. Little “white lies,” so innocently told, can lead to others as liars try to cover their tracks. “So few lies are solitary ones,” writes Bok. “The first lie ‘must be thatched with another or it will rain through.’”

Once we see how easy it is to lie, a single lie can become a life of lies. The little lies can make the larger ones seem so easy, so convenient. But lies are corrosive, even deadly. A parent lies to a sick child because the little girl “can’t handle the truth,” and he keeps her from dealing with her illness. An accountant cooks the books because “everyone does it,” and he commits fraud. A doctor provides an abortion because she tells herself that the fetus “isn’t a person,” and she takes an innocent life.

Lying offends the truth God has entrusted to us, destroys the trust that we have in each other, and harms our relationship with God (Catechism, no. 2483). It also is capable of destroying human life. A society of liars, like a society of thieves, cannot exist for long.

For centuries, secular philosophy has assured us that it is a far better teacher of ethics than the Church. But how has it done? Bok’s book is a report card two centuries in the making. In the eighteenth century, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant “discovered” what the Church had always known—that lying is wrong. But his teaching had an iron edge: Telling the truth for him was a “categorical imperative,” something one must do regardless of the consequences.

The problem, Bok argues, is that the ideal of compelling the truth breaks up on the shoals of experience. What if you were hiding Jews from Nazis? Are you morally compelled to tell the truth, even if doing so would cause the deaths of innocent people? Kant’s idea suddenly seems wildly impractical, even heartless.

Other philosophies offer even less appealing guidance. Moral anarchists say that lying is so commonplace that we are permitted to lie as often as we need in order to meet our needs. Utilitarian thinkers attempt to justify particular lies through assessing the “good” they could produce—the number of lives a lie saves, for instance—though the vaunted benefits of lies often have a hollow ring.

The most tortured reasoning Bok discovered was the “loopholes” sought in Kant’s universal prohibition to lie by more legalistic thinkers—like using “mental reservation,” in which people tell only part of what they are thinking to misdirect others. A president, for instance, could deny having sex with an intern, so long as his definition of sex didn’t include what they did. Theoretically, his “mental reservation” wasn’t a lie. Practically, of course, it was.

In the end, Bok’s book shows how two centuries of moral philosophy have led to moral anarchy. Kant’s theory failed, and the “excuses” offered in its place are at best sloppy ethical shortcuts. Our justifications for lying are most often lies themselves.

Though she doesn’t adopt a Catholic, or even an explicitly Christian perspective, Bok’s research on the ethics of lying actually leads back to the Church. The core of Bok’s solution to the problem of lying in human life is actually a matter of emphasis: What is important? Is it not lying? Or is it respecting and seeking the truth?

Of course, lying is incompatible with truth. But living in truth requires much more than not lying, in the same way that living a chaste life is much more than not having sex. While the Catechism condemns lying, it also recognizes that some lies are worse than others: “The gravity of a lie is measured against the nature of the truth it deforms, the circumstances, the intentions of the one who lies, and the harm suffered by its victims” (no. 2484).

The Catechism rejects lying, to be sure, but in comparison to Kant’s “categorical imperative” approach, it allows for the wisdom that flows from centuries of Christian teaching on the subject, resulting not in a form of “situational ethics,” but in an understanding of the differences between lies. Both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas agreed about the sinfulness and profound danger of lying, but they also recognized some distinctions, and Aquinas’s is particularly important. Lies that do great harm are mortal sins, he said, while “white lies” that do little harm (like my lie about the pebble) are venial.

Aquinas wasn’t giving a blank check for some types of lies. A venial sin is still a sin. Lying is still wrong, even if it is done for a justifiable cause. Respecting truth means that truth is always good. A lie, at best, is only a little wrong, and a liar, no matter how good the excuse, is still a liar.

Respecting the truth, though, isn’t the same as telling the truth without discretion, what Bok calls “truth dumping.” Telling a little girl that her nose reminds you of a pig’s snout isn’t better than telling her that she is the most beautiful girl in the world. “Everyone must conform his life to the Gospel precept of fraternal love,” the Catechism says. “This requires us in concrete situations to judge whether or not it is appropriate to reveal the truth to someone who asks for it” (no. 2488).

As confessors, Catholic priests are living examples of how to maintain confidentiality while respecting the truth. The seal of the confessional is inviolable, and priests must keep what they hear there in the strictest confidence.

But they don’t lie. They keep silent when sensitive topics come up, and they avoid situations or conversations where boundaries could be crossed. A priest’s confidentiality requires discipline, imagination, and work, but it provides a model for all of us.

Respecting the truth requires accepting the burden that truth brings. “Trust and integrity are precious resources,” Bok writes, “easily squandered, hard to regain. They can thrive only on a foundation of respect for veracity.” We are to defend and preserve the truth, the Catechism teaches, even to the point of martyrdom (no. 2474). But most of all, we are to respect the truth and lead a life worthy of what we have received.

C. T. Maier writes from Pittsburgh and works in the communications office of the Diocese of Pittsburgh.

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