Duplicitous Remembrance: Confessing Self‐Deception with Augustine

Abstract While self‐deception has long been a topic of interest in psychology and analytic philosophy—and increasingly in the academic study of theology and religion—direct engagement with Augustine on self‐deception remains underexplored in contemporary scholarship. This article demonstrates how an Augustinian account of self‐deception, drawn from Augustine's accounts of memory and lying, might offer a constructive intervention in contemporary debates around self‐deception in analytic philosophy and theology. My Augustinian account of self‐deception reconceptualizes self‐deception as entailing not just duplicitous speech but duplicitous remembrance. The upshot of my account is that self‐deception can involve lying to oneself without successfully persuading oneself. Finally, since an Augustinian account of self‐deception suggests that our self‐knowledge is always bound up in another's knowledge of us, I suggest how Augustine provides theological and ethical resources for remembering justly by confessing and confronting the past together.