‘God does not need my lie’: Who really said it? (A quick one)

[Saint Augustine? Martin Luther? Blaise Pascal? Someone else?]

The Sufferings of Job (Silvestro Chiesa, 1623–1657)

Who originated the much-quoted epigram “God does not need my lie”? Or, alternatively, “God does not need your lie”?

Both versions of this pithy saying have long been ascribed to St. Augustine—but, if he is the author, in which work did he write it? I’ve never seen it linked to a specific book or sermon of Augustine’s. That’s a red flag, and the line also been ascribed to modern figures, including Martin Luther, Blaise Pascal, and St. John Henry Newman, also sans specific attribution.

Dig into this for a while, and you’ll discover a possible lead: People who ascribe it to Augustine often footnote the French Catholic philosopher and theologian Jacques Maritain. Sometimes they even give a putative Latin original, “Deus non eget meo mendacio” (God does not need my lie).

Keep digging, and you’ll discover that Maritain did indeed ascribe the quotation to Augustine, and he did give this Latin version—but Maritain, too, cites no specific work. Still, the Latin is a clue: The quotation probably is not modern. If someone like Martin Luther or Pascal ever said such a thing, they most likely got it from an ancient or medieval source, probably a patristic source. Maritain presumably didn’t just make up the Latin; he was giving a memorable line as he recalled it in good faith from a work he read in Latin. If it wasn’t Augustine, it would most probably be some other patristic figure of similar stature whom Maritain later misremembered as Augustine (a common mechanism for misattribution of quotations).

And that, alas, is where my own detective work ends! Among my friends, though, I count some detectives better and more determined than I am—and one of them, a veteran reference librarian, dug up the likely source!

It turns out that the line is apparently a slight misquotation, not from Augustine, but from another of the most revered and influential of the Latin Fathers, Pope St. Gregory the Great. In his Moralia in Job or Morals in the Book of Job, Pope Gregory writes: “Deus non eget mendacio” (“God has no need for a lie”).

This version includes no possessive pronoun—but the verse on which Pope Gregory is here commenting, Job 13:7, reads in the Latin Vulgate, “Numquid Deus indiget vestro mendacio” (“Does God need your lie?”). Thus, “God does not need my/your lie” appears to be a slightly paraphrased conflation of Gregory’s declarative statement “God does not need a lie” with the text of Job with its vivid personal pronoun. (Maritain later misremembered the pronoun as first person rather than second person, though both versions have since been perpetuated.) So now you know!

(Quote attributions matter. God does not need a lie.)

See also