I've never been able to dredge up support for Chrysostom, having the same feelings about him as you have about Augustine, and now you tell me he's a liar too. Not surprising. I'm comfortable with my selection of fathers. But that goes back to how one knows for sure, because your having a good selection isn't the only way to do it .... Ooh, you also exempt OrthodoxWiki even though it's been tested by true believers, interesting selectivity ....
I am appreciative of your links. Basil letter 8 to Caesarea does not contain the text quoted, and your source does not appear in search; the text appears to be an anon proverb, and does not speak of deception but of silence anyway, so we can exclude that.
To Ambrose, I do (because of just-war doctrine) admit of the use of subtlety in wartime but I do not count this as deception. The reason is that in a declared war, you have forthrightly told the enemy that you are treating him as dead to you and that you have no further relations with him. If it then happens that the enemy reads your communications and misleads himself, that's his own fault, you weren't speaking to him. If your army knows full well what it's doing but roleplays something else knowing that the enemy may easily draw a wrong conclusion, that's part of his status as an enemy that you told him about honestly. Relations are not restored except by ratified treaty (oath) appealing to something outside ourselves. So I don't call it deception in war. If someone's declared war against me and then requests parley or waves a white flag, that is a signal but cannot be trusted or confirmed until it is tested, so I had better still be on my guard; to use such a symbol and then to recant it would be deception in war and would be a war crime, but my part if I were deceived is also blameworthy, because the official comms were total war. Again, the command is about false testimony, not about impressions people get who you have excluded from your communication; the NT application is similar, Col. 3:9. The idea that laws may contradict each other is ultimately harmful to the principle of law in the first place, but the idea that case laws like just-war doctrine are about specific situations that have different or mixed characteristics compared to general situations is self-consistent and is how all statutory construction works (as Paul teaches by example).
So that leaves Chrysostom and Nazianzus, for which my reflexive answer is to exclude them as being the outliers. But, not having the depths of study on all the fathers, I realize that may be incomplete. A search shows that, yes, they got it from Origen and Clement of Alexandria (Migne 9:475-477), who gave Christianity the "therapeutic lie" that Chrysostom and Nazianzus invoke. Chrysostom's defense is stated to be "trying to apologize to his dear friend Basil, due to a similar deception that he committed against him", which is a rather telling detail. But the actual case Chrysostom gives is a doctor who allowed a patient to think that a medication was actually wine, apparently without actual lying. Though he extends this hypothetically to other cases and invokes Michal's statement in 1 Sam. 19:14 (not a formal lie), his comparing it to stagecraft (which is advertised as storytelling and therefore honest) indicates that we need not necessarily treat him as countenancing direct, intentional deception. (But I'm being charitable to him.) Therefore I consider myself free to interpret that the deception these fathers reject is that which involves material falsehood and not the use of means by which a goal is achieved without violating a person's right to consent or to be sufficiently informed. If the doctor is asked if the drink contains medication, he should answer truthfully, but if the doctor knows that the patient will drink that which smells like wine without questioning it then his accomplishing his goal by that route is by silence, not by deception.
The link shows that Tristam Engelhardt 2000 regards Orthodox ethics as teaching that deliberate deception to protect a soul from spiritual harm, via pure, exclusive good purpose, is both acceptable and yet a sin. I am free to reject such a contradictory reading of the fathers, and to regard Paisios of Mount Athos as normative rather than in tension with others (Christodoulos Ageloglou 1998 p. 140):
It is a sin for someone to lie. When he lies for a good cause, i.e. to save someone else, then it is half a sin, because the lie is for the benefit of his fellow man and not for himself. However, it is also considered a sin; therefore, we should keep it in mind, and not fall into the habit of telling lies for insignificant things.
Chrysostom also equivocates (admits contradictory definitions) on the position of reading him as hard in favor of deliberate deception:
Great is the power of deceit; only it must not be applied with a treacherous intention. Or rather, it is not right to call such action deceit, but good management and tact and skill enough to find many ways through an impasse, and to correct the faults of the spirit.
TLDR: I respect it's a hard case and church opinions differ, including interpretations of the interpretations. I remain subject to my own conscience that I do not permit deception at all even as I am not always called to tell everyone everything. You remain subject to your own conscience, even as you act like your conscience is identical with some construct that you describe as the church's conscience, but which you select from as if Augustine can be dismissed. Therefore ultimately we come back to the issue of individual judgment that is responsible to judge communal judgment. Follow a multitude, but not to evil.
That's begging the question how do you determine what aggression is just. Scripture and Church history give examples of aggression being justified and God Himself engages in it (OT is full of it, but also Jesus whipping the crap out of the moneylenders).
I've never been able to dredge up support for Chrysostom, having the same feelings about him as you have about Augustine, and now you tell me he's a liar too. Not surprising. I'm comfortable with my selection of fathers.
A liar? Gtfo dude. I don't base my position on vibes so don't give me that. Go collect Church fathers as if they're pokemons. What's your standard for discerning which father is reliable? Your personal judgment? Makes sense when you're your own Pope.
Btw no Church father teaches that lying is not a sin but that it could be justified under some circumstances. Same goes for killing. St. Paisios reiterates the patristic position.
I remain subject to my own conscience that I do not permit deception at all even as I am not always called to tell everyone everything.
You do you, it's not as if your bound to any position. Tomorrow you may wake up with a different feeling and go off it. But if I were to use your standard and go off my feeling, I'd not trust a single word you write here. You give me a very slimy and deceitful vibe. I sense you're posing as something you're not.
That's begging the question how do you determine what aggression is just.
It's not begging the question, I explicitly told you that it's a long digression when we try to describe all the cases. Jesus wasn't said to use the whip on the moneylenders, he probably directed animals with it. No aggression is to be permitted and aggression is defined as threatening or initiating force against another's person or property. Lots of Christians have theologies that permit some aggressions, as you do with your permission of lying, but I believe they're inconsistent. Now, you may want to know about the regulations by which I permit a just war, such as a formal judgment of the serious aggression conducted by the other party, and an offer of terms of peace, a final unequivocal declaration of war, and the prohibition of war crimes. But I'm not sure you want to know, because the thrust is that you believe there is no absolute principle, and I say that both the general and the specific principles are absolute each in their own application and can be sufficiently stated in a few words in any particular case. So if you want to continue the question with specific cases, I'd be happy to hear your propositions and difficult passages.
I summarized your position that Chrysostom accepts deliberate deception with the less charitable "you tell me he's a liar". I don't see a need to modify that statement in its context. In the greater detail, I showed that you may be wrong (he may not accept deliberate deception) and that Chrysostom equivocates by admitting two meanings of the word "deceit", making him hard to pin down.
Go collect Church fathers as if they're pokemons.
As you do with Augustine and Origen. (I dislike Origen but I note that the Church did not condemn him and, out of respect for his other contributions, deliberately avoided using his name when anathematizing "monstrous apokatastasis", leaving the reader to decide the difference between monstrous and Biblical apokatastasis. So I interpret Origen in context, but you seem to dismiss him out of hand.)
What's your standard for discerning which father is reliable? Your personal judgment?
And what's your standard? A few other people's personal judgment? Your own Patriarch? Follow a multitude, but not to evil.
Btw no Church father teaches that lying is not a sin but that it could be justified under some circumstances.
But you said the fathers support the idea that "there is ever a time to deceive or mislead". You quoted Nazianzus, "It is necessary sometimes to deceive." How can there be a time for it, and it be necessary, if it is never justified? Get the semantics right please. There is no temptation except what is common to man and where God gives you a way out that you can bear up under it. If you say sin is necessary, you're in the Romans 3 loop of getting Paul's smackdown.
Please don't play the game of swapping murdering for killing. Murder is never justified. Do I need to call you out on your claim that all commands have exceptions?
You do you, it's not as if your bound to any position. Tomorrow you may wake up with a different feeling and go off it.
I tested all bonds and found only one would hold, my bond in Christ. I'm pretty confident that "No false testimony" will never admit of exception, but ultimately my confidence is that Christ will defend his word, not me. It's not in my power to protect myself against losing the truth, it's only in Christ's power and he has promised me I cannot slip from his hand. Feelings have nothing to do with it, they have been crucified. My unity of commitment has been vindicated by the fact that, having committed all to him, he continually gives light on any question that skeptics present to me, whether I had already learned the truth of the matter or whether I look into a new matter briefly. The consistency of all truth is his to uphold, not mine, and having taken my own hands off what is his responsibility, I've been freed up to enjoy his ever-growing manifestation of truth.
You begin to doubt me as I affirm commitment to rejecting all deception, even as you are the one stating leeway to permit deception in some way. Well, anyone is free to doubt, I can only appeal to Christ. I might point you to my five years of record here, or refer to my growing up in a covenantal church, learning about the Near East culture of the Bible so that I could understand the relationship of OT and NT, and my learning to be all things to all men to save some, with my one commitment to Jesus as Truth becoming my only motive. But if your position is that I'm wrong for using my judgment, even though everyone does so and you use your judgment to suspend your remaining judgment to the Church, and if you don't think you're using your judgment, I can only point out the illogic, as many ways as you permit me, and leave it there. You made an offhand comment that lying is sometimes justified, and you come full circle by discussing treating me as if I always were justifying lying, in every sentence. There's a reason why I do me as I do.
I don't believe so, I use just-war doctrine.
I've never been able to dredge up support for Chrysostom, having the same feelings about him as you have about Augustine, and now you tell me he's a liar too. Not surprising. I'm comfortable with my selection of fathers. But that goes back to how one knows for sure, because your having a good selection isn't the only way to do it .... Ooh, you also exempt OrthodoxWiki even though it's been tested by true believers, interesting selectivity ....
I am appreciative of your links. Basil letter 8 to Caesarea does not contain the text quoted, and your source does not appear in search; the text appears to be an anon proverb, and does not speak of deception but of silence anyway, so we can exclude that.
To Ambrose, I do (because of just-war doctrine) admit of the use of subtlety in wartime but I do not count this as deception. The reason is that in a declared war, you have forthrightly told the enemy that you are treating him as dead to you and that you have no further relations with him. If it then happens that the enemy reads your communications and misleads himself, that's his own fault, you weren't speaking to him. If your army knows full well what it's doing but roleplays something else knowing that the enemy may easily draw a wrong conclusion, that's part of his status as an enemy that you told him about honestly. Relations are not restored except by ratified treaty (oath) appealing to something outside ourselves. So I don't call it deception in war. If someone's declared war against me and then requests parley or waves a white flag, that is a signal but cannot be trusted or confirmed until it is tested, so I had better still be on my guard; to use such a symbol and then to recant it would be deception in war and would be a war crime, but my part if I were deceived is also blameworthy, because the official comms were total war. Again, the command is about false testimony, not about impressions people get who you have excluded from your communication; the NT application is similar, Col. 3:9. The idea that laws may contradict each other is ultimately harmful to the principle of law in the first place, but the idea that case laws like just-war doctrine are about specific situations that have different or mixed characteristics compared to general situations is self-consistent and is how all statutory construction works (as Paul teaches by example).
So that leaves Chrysostom and Nazianzus, for which my reflexive answer is to exclude them as being the outliers. But, not having the depths of study on all the fathers, I realize that may be incomplete. A search shows that, yes, they got it from Origen and Clement of Alexandria (Migne 9:475-477), who gave Christianity the "therapeutic lie" that Chrysostom and Nazianzus invoke. Chrysostom's defense is stated to be "trying to apologize to his dear friend Basil, due to a similar deception that he committed against him", which is a rather telling detail. But the actual case Chrysostom gives is a doctor who allowed a patient to think that a medication was actually wine, apparently without actual lying. Though he extends this hypothetically to other cases and invokes Michal's statement in 1 Sam. 19:14 (not a formal lie), his comparing it to stagecraft (which is advertised as storytelling and therefore honest) indicates that we need not necessarily treat him as countenancing direct, intentional deception. (But I'm being charitable to him.) Therefore I consider myself free to interpret that the deception these fathers reject is that which involves material falsehood and not the use of means by which a goal is achieved without violating a person's right to consent or to be sufficiently informed. If the doctor is asked if the drink contains medication, he should answer truthfully, but if the doctor knows that the patient will drink that which smells like wine without questioning it then his accomplishing his goal by that route is by silence, not by deception.
The link shows that Tristam Engelhardt 2000 regards Orthodox ethics as teaching that deliberate deception to protect a soul from spiritual harm, via pure, exclusive good purpose, is both acceptable and yet a sin. I am free to reject such a contradictory reading of the fathers, and to regard Paisios of Mount Athos as normative rather than in tension with others (Christodoulos Ageloglou 1998 p. 140):
Chrysostom also equivocates (admits contradictory definitions) on the position of reading him as hard in favor of deliberate deception:
TLDR: I respect it's a hard case and church opinions differ, including interpretations of the interpretations. I remain subject to my own conscience that I do not permit deception at all even as I am not always called to tell everyone everything. You remain subject to your own conscience, even as you act like your conscience is identical with some construct that you describe as the church's conscience, but which you select from as if Augustine can be dismissed. Therefore ultimately we come back to the issue of individual judgment that is responsible to judge communal judgment. Follow a multitude, but not to evil.
That's begging the question how do you determine what aggression is just. Scripture and Church history give examples of aggression being justified and God Himself engages in it (OT is full of it, but also Jesus whipping the crap out of the moneylenders).
A liar? Gtfo dude. I don't base my position on vibes so don't give me that. Go collect Church fathers as if they're pokemons. What's your standard for discerning which father is reliable? Your personal judgment? Makes sense when you're your own Pope.
Btw no Church father teaches that lying is not a sin but that it could be justified under some circumstances. Same goes for killing. St. Paisios reiterates the patristic position.
You do you, it's not as if your bound to any position. Tomorrow you may wake up with a different feeling and go off it. But if I were to use your standard and go off my feeling, I'd not trust a single word you write here. You give me a very slimy and deceitful vibe. I sense you're posing as something you're not.
It's not begging the question, I explicitly told you that it's a long digression when we try to describe all the cases. Jesus wasn't said to use the whip on the moneylenders, he probably directed animals with it. No aggression is to be permitted and aggression is defined as threatening or initiating force against another's person or property. Lots of Christians have theologies that permit some aggressions, as you do with your permission of lying, but I believe they're inconsistent. Now, you may want to know about the regulations by which I permit a just war, such as a formal judgment of the serious aggression conducted by the other party, and an offer of terms of peace, a final unequivocal declaration of war, and the prohibition of war crimes. But I'm not sure you want to know, because the thrust is that you believe there is no absolute principle, and I say that both the general and the specific principles are absolute each in their own application and can be sufficiently stated in a few words in any particular case. So if you want to continue the question with specific cases, I'd be happy to hear your propositions and difficult passages.
I summarized your position that Chrysostom accepts deliberate deception with the less charitable "you tell me he's a liar". I don't see a need to modify that statement in its context. In the greater detail, I showed that you may be wrong (he may not accept deliberate deception) and that Chrysostom equivocates by admitting two meanings of the word "deceit", making him hard to pin down.
As you do with Augustine and Origen. (I dislike Origen but I note that the Church did not condemn him and, out of respect for his other contributions, deliberately avoided using his name when anathematizing "monstrous apokatastasis", leaving the reader to decide the difference between monstrous and Biblical apokatastasis. So I interpret Origen in context, but you seem to dismiss him out of hand.)
And what's your standard? A few other people's personal judgment? Your own Patriarch? Follow a multitude, but not to evil.
But you said the fathers support the idea that "there is ever a time to deceive or mislead". You quoted Nazianzus, "It is necessary sometimes to deceive." How can there be a time for it, and it be necessary, if it is never justified? Get the semantics right please. There is no temptation except what is common to man and where God gives you a way out that you can bear up under it. If you say sin is necessary, you're in the Romans 3 loop of getting Paul's smackdown.
Please don't play the game of swapping murdering for killing. Murder is never justified. Do I need to call you out on your claim that all commands have exceptions?
I tested all bonds and found only one would hold, my bond in Christ. I'm pretty confident that "No false testimony" will never admit of exception, but ultimately my confidence is that Christ will defend his word, not me. It's not in my power to protect myself against losing the truth, it's only in Christ's power and he has promised me I cannot slip from his hand. Feelings have nothing to do with it, they have been crucified. My unity of commitment has been vindicated by the fact that, having committed all to him, he continually gives light on any question that skeptics present to me, whether I had already learned the truth of the matter or whether I look into a new matter briefly. The consistency of all truth is his to uphold, not mine, and having taken my own hands off what is his responsibility, I've been freed up to enjoy his ever-growing manifestation of truth.
You begin to doubt me as I affirm commitment to rejecting all deception, even as you are the one stating leeway to permit deception in some way. Well, anyone is free to doubt, I can only appeal to Christ. I might point you to my five years of record here, or refer to my growing up in a covenantal church, learning about the Near East culture of the Bible so that I could understand the relationship of OT and NT, and my learning to be all things to all men to save some, with my one commitment to Jesus as Truth becoming my only motive. But if your position is that I'm wrong for using my judgment, even though everyone does so and you use your judgment to suspend your remaining judgment to the Church, and if you don't think you're using your judgment, I can only point out the illogic, as many ways as you permit me, and leave it there. You made an offhand comment that lying is sometimes justified, and you come full circle by discussing treating me as if I always were justifying lying, in every sentence. There's a reason why I do me as I do.