“No human being can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who are made in the likeness of God” (James 3:8-9)
This passage perfectly summarizes the moral issues with human speech. We can call the multitudes to conversion, as St. Peter does on Pentecost (Acts 2:14-42), or we can call them to violence, ignorance, and harm.
In the realm of sinful speech, we should start with a reminder that sins of the tongue are not only sins against the Eighth Commandment (not bearing false witness). They often touch on other aspects of the moral life. Speech intended to inflict harm often violates the Fifth Commandment (not killing); likewise, speech can be used to incite lust (the Sixth and Ninth Commandments), irreverence (the First and Second Commandments), and envy or jealousy (the Tenth Commandment). In other words, it would be a serious mistake to act as if matters of speaking are somehow exempt from moral culpability. Perhaps the greatest sin of the tongue in our present age is simply the idea that speech (especially online speech) can float freely above the actual content of Christian morality. Our Lord is quite clear on this point in Luke 6:45: whether evil or good, “out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.”
In traditional treatments of the virtues, sins of the tongue most often fall under the category of justice, which is the habit of well-ordered relationships. Let us look in turn at some of the more common ways we fall short.
Lying
The Eighth Commandment, which forbids “bearing false witness,” is usually read by the tradition as a statement of our natural duty to truthfulness. The Catechism quotes St. Thomas Aquinas in explaining why truth is integral to natural justice: “Since man is a social animal, one man naturally owes another whatever is necessary for the preservation of human society. Now it would be impossible for men to live together, unless they believed one another, as declaring the truth one to another” (ST II-II, q109, ad1; see CCC 2469).
Lying is a sin against truth. Like other virtues, truth or truthfulness sits between excess and defect. “Excessive” and “defective” versions of truthfulness are situational, because something cannot be “excessively” true or false. But in a given situation, we can sin against truth (and prudence) either by sharing more than we should, like giving my latest cholesterol numbers and children’s report cards to the guy sitting next to me on the subway—or by staying quiet when we should speak, like not making an observation that could save someone from harm.
Catholic teaching insists that lying in itself, which is saying something we know to be untrue, is always a sin. But we need to make two important qualifications to this principle. First, figurative or metaphorical speech is not lying, because the intention is to convey truth (see ST II-II, q110, a3, ad6). Second, not every lie is a mortal sin.
Nor is it lying to say something that you believe erroneously to be true. This is a hard lesson at times! How many times have my children accused me or their siblings of “lying” because of an honest mistake? Yes, I may have said you could have some chocolate ice cream, but it turns out that we do not have any chocolate ice cream. “But to lie,” Fr. Gregory Pine writes in his new book Training the Tongue, “is to intentionally separate knowledge and speech. A liar says something as if it were the truth when he knows otherwise.”
The biggest moral factor in lying is its object. Why are you telling the lie? What is the end? Again, lying itself is never lawful, but some purposes may either increase or lessen moral culpability. The worst kind of lies are those with the intention is to cause harm. Less evil (again, this is not to say good or licit!) are those directed toward some good. (Thomas calls these “jocose” or “officious” lies.)
Blasphemy vs. Irreverence
Often I hear people confess to “blasphemy” when what they mean is that they said, “Oh, my God” or used the name of Jesus as an exclamation. Similarly, people will worry about consuming “blasphemous” material, by which they mean movies or shows containing such speech.
I think this description is overstated. In the Catechism, blasphemy is a more serious and intentional personal attack on God or the things of God. Many times, the speech in question is simply irreverent or careless. Irreverence is still a sin, but it is usually less serious than blasphemy.
The Catechism points out that “it is also blasphemous to make use of God’s name to cover up criminal practices, to reduce people to servitude, to torture persons or put them to death (2148). Using the name of God to promote evil is its own different kind of blasphemy from verbally cursing God.
Speech Against Persons
The sheer multiplicity of the vocabulary here is itself a testament to the ways sin against others can manifest itself in our speech: flattery, contumely, blasphemy, reviling, detraction, calumny, backbiting, tale-bearing, derision, defamation, libel, slander. I will not attempt here to define them all! Here are what I think the most useful distinctions to keep in mind:
Defamation is the most common civil legal term for speech intended to damage another person or his reputation. Libel is defamation in writing, and slander is defamation in spoken word. The Catholic moral tradition tends to use the term “reviling” here in close relationship with the civil concept of defamation, the main difference being that defamation is a legal concept, whereas reviling is a moral concept. The two main kinds of reviling are calumny and detraction. Both are intended to hurt someone or his reputation, but calumny does so by known falsehood, whereas detraction does so by an uncharitable use of the truth. Fr. Pine again: “Detraction doesn’t traffic in falsity, but it is still sinful because it undermines our neighbor’s reputation unjustly. . . . Each of us deserves, in justice, to have our reputation respected, and each of us is bound, in justice, to respect the reputation of our neighbors.”
Harsh speech and derision are moral terms. It is rarely illegal (except perhaps in the internal world of film and TV ratings systems) to say something purely insulting or coarse, but it can certainly be immoral. It is not so much that the words themselves (for example, curse words) are evil in themselves as an utterance of sound or a string of letters, but they are inseparably linked with their social context.
Derision is the use of harsh speech or reviling with the intention to mock or shame. It may be an effective rhetorical device to evoke strong feelings about a subject, and so it may be tempting if the goal is true and worthy—convincing people to avoid some evil, for example. Admittedly, it is also hard at times to distinguish between true derision or coarse language and the expression of a truth that is in itself ugly. Often we can truly judge only our own intentions, and try as well as we can to regulate our own speech by the standards of charity: when stating something harsh or ugly, do we do so with the goal of speaking a truth that will illuminate, edify, or prevent harm, or do we do it with the goal of demeaning or dehumanizing an opponent (even if that opponent is promoting some great evil!)?
Gossip and the Age of Mass Communication
Of the sins listed above, many relate closely to the general modern term gossip. If gossip simply refers to a bit of exciting news, it is probably not a matter of sin. If it involves telling someone something about someone else that he has no business knowing, it is very likely a sin.
The internet has created a world where things are rarely private. What in another era would be private gossip quickly becomes public derision. With a larger public square, it becomes even easier to fall into the sin of listening to such sinful speech and giving implicit space to it. Technology has accelerated the problem envisioned centuries ago in the Roman Catechism, which warned against those “who feel a malignant pleasure in sowing discord.”
Perhaps we should coin a new term for those who knowingly create entire systems and algorithms devoted to sins of speech. But naming those evils will go only so far. The virtues of truth and reverence can develop only when we refuse the siren call of rash judgment and instant commentary, remembering that the ultimate purpose of speech is before anything else the worship of God.