Augustine's exposition of the image of God in Book 15 of On The Trinity (De Trinitate) sheds light on multiple issues that arise in scholarly interpretations of Augustine's account of lying. This essay argues against interpretations that posit a uniform account of lying in Augustine—with the same constitutive features, and insisting both that it is never necessary to tell a lie and that lying is absolutely prohibited. Such interpretations regularly employ intertextual reading strategies that elide distinctions and developments in Augustine's ethics of lying. Instead, I show how looking at texts written prior and subsequent to the texts usually consulted suggests a trajectory in Augustine's thought, beginning with an understanding of lies as morally culpable but potentially necessary, and culminating in a vision of lying as the fundamental evil and the origin of every sin.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s unfinished and posthumously published Ethics was intended to be his magnum opus. However, its incomplete structure and the distinct ethical approaches evident in its unfinished essays have allowed for considerable debate about its overall coherence and contours, as well as the hermeneutics appropriate to the text. This essay reconsiders prior interpretations of Bonhoeffer’s Ethics through close readings that disclose three rival versions of moral reasoning operative in three manuscripts from Bonhoeffer’s Ethics. Retracing his reasoning regarding the ethics of lying, the place of guilt, and the relation between the law of God and God’s will, I argue that Bonhoeffer’s detractors and defenders alike have misconstrued the controversial ethic of “actively embracing guilt” (Schuldübernahme). Far from the paradigmatic expression of Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, its organizing theme, or the basis for his participation in the tyrannicide plot against Hitler, Bonhoeffer’s reflection on Schuldübernahme is properly understood as an outlier—a short-lived thought experiment that he critiques and reconceives in two alternative versions of moral reasoning in later chapters.
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