Abstract

This paper studies the discussions on the definition and moral axiology of lying by two fourteenth-century Franciscan theologians, Francis of Meyronnes and Gerald Odonis, placed against the both broader context of late medieval scholasticism in general and the Franciscan moral theology in particular. Augustine’s doxa on mendacity largely dominated the late medieval intellectual landscape, but his teachings were challenged by alternative definitional and axiological schemes of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Both Meyronnes and Odonis, in their Decalogue and Ethics commentaries respectively, defended the Augustine’s intention-centric definition of lying and his rigorist condemnation of lying as a sin, but they also fully engaged with Aristotle’s arguments, and explored the notion of mendacity as a deviation from the virtuous mean, and the idea of mendaciousness as a habitual vice. They presented, each in his own way, an Aristotelianised re-reading of the fundamental tenets of Augustinian doctrines.