Is lying ever permissible? Can speaking contrary to facts be virtuous? According to Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, no. David Bentley Hart would disagree. In the fourth chapter of his recent, controversial book You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature, “Pia Fraus: Our Words and God’s Truth,” Hart persuasively argues his case in his typical, sinuous prose. His thesis may be stated in an elegant paradox: “A certain concern for the facts may arise from a devotion to Truth; but sometimes facts are the lies this world tells about the true nature of reality, and so to speak those facts is to serve the father of lies rather than God.”[i] I am inclined to agree, yet a niggling voice in the back of my mind worries that Hart’s argument is not only sophisticated but sophistical. The fact of the matter is that Christians have been speculating on truth for two millennia now, so why is a theologian just now discovering truth’s true nature?
The short answer, I think, is that the discovery isn’t entirely new. Early in the chapter Hart slips in the sly but seemingly innocuous suggestion that beyond the kind of truth in which the mind’s ideas correspond to the world’s things, “there is another kind of truth, and perhaps at times a much higher one, appropriate to fiction.” Still quite innocuous, Hart suggests that in the most absolute sense God is Truth, and in him “the True, Good, and Beautiful are all one and the same splendor of the real, one and the same perfect act of being.” There is, then, the truth of facts, the truth of fiction, and the truth of God.
Others before Hart have considered these three aspects of truth, though perhaps not precisely from Hart’s angle. Sir Philip Sidney and J.R.R. Tolkien sit foremost in my mind. Sidney was a Protestant aristocrat-poet from the Elizabethan era, and Tolkien was a Catholic philologist and fantasy novelist from the twentieth century. In their works these writers did not defend the possible virtuousness of lying per se, but of feigning; that is, the creation of imaginative literature. They were, however, defending such literature against those who considered it tantamount to lying. Namely, Plato and Sigmund Freud.
Sidney’s Answer to Plato
Plato, it is well-known, banished the poets from his ideal Republic, considering them to be morally dubious. According to Plato, poets imitate the world of nature, which is itself an imitation of the true reality, the world of Ideas; hence, they merely imitate an imitation, propagating falsehoods by working at a double remove from reality.[ii]
In Plato’s wake, Neo-Platonists, including many Christian Platonists, would inherit the Platonic dualism while creating a privileged, rather than a derogatory, place for art. In their view the artist does not solely imitate nature, but by a kind of inspiration achieves a kind of access to the world of Ideas, which in Christianity were the ideas of the divine intellect. So, rather than imitating nature, the poets imitate that which nature imitates, sometimes surpassing her.
One may soundly locate Sidney’s The Defense of Poesy in this tradition, contrasting as he does the world of nature with the world created by poets: “Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as diverse poets have done; neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too-much-loved earth more lovely. Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.”[iii] For Sidney, the beauty of poetry may surpass the beauty of nature, and the same might be said for goodness and truth. For Sidney, these transcendentals go hand in hand, interpenetrating one another. In C.S. Lewis’ phrase, “Virtue is lovely, not merely obligatory; a celestial mistress, not a categorical imperative.” Sidney continues, “The history, being captived to the truth of a foolish world, is many times a terror from well-doing, and an encouragement to unbridled wickedness.” The historian, qua historian, is limited to the facts of a fallen world, so that to learn from history, one must invoke the poet in the historian to imagine how things might have been otherwise. Sidney reaches the height of his argument in describing the unique contribution of the poets. The poets “most properly do imitate to teach and delight, and to imitate borrow nothing of what is, has been, or shall be; but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be.” As it does not imitate the world of phenomenal experience, this mysterious imitation seems to require something like divine illumination, even if in the dim light of conscience.
Tolkien’s Answer to Freud
Not everyone was convinced by Sidney, or even knew of him, and by the twentieth century J.R.R. Tolkien would write his own defence of fiction. He composed his poem “Mythopoeia” as a letter to C.S. Lewis, before the latter man had converted to Christianity. In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien, leaving Lewis unnamed, describes his addressee as “a man who described myth and fairy-story as ‘lies’” though “he was kind enough and confused enough to call fairy-story making ‘Breathing a lie through Silver.’”[iv] Quite appropriately, the poem’s title is Greek for “Mythmaking.” Its subtitle is “Philomythus to Misomythus,” meaning “Lover of Myth to Hater of Myth.” (Tolkien may have had Sidney in mind, as the earlier poet names his opponents “misomousoi,” meaning “poet-haters.”) In themselves, these symbolic names suggest that Tolkien is aiming for a larger audience than Lewis alone. Though Tolkien’s friendship with Lewis may have provided the immediate stimulus for the work, I believe that the poem is more fundamentally an engagement with Sigmund Freud. Though Freud is mostly looked upon as an historical oddity nowadays, I believe his influence to be greater than commonly supposed, and certainly his influence was very great indeed in the first half of the twentieth century.[v]
For Freud, the common source of fiction and religion is the psychological mechanism of wish-fulfilment. Through this mechanism one’s unconscious, repressed desires are fulfilled in symbolic forms. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud characterizes religion and its fantasies as illusions, and while they, unlike delusions, may be true, their cause is so suspect that they might as well be false.[vi] Freud’s description of religion’s origin goes something like this: we are protected by our fathers from childhood’s “terrifying impression of helplessness,” but such protection is imperfect, and the sense of helplessness continues even as one matures, so people “cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one.” This more powerful father is, of course, God. Moreover, according to Freud, “providence,” “a moral world-order,” and the immortality of the soul are, mere wish-fulfillments that allay people’s fears and unfulfilled senses of justice. According to Freud’s tragic vision, the world is almost always other than we would have it be. We should not delude ourselves into thinking that the world is better than it is, and we certainly should not think that there is another, better world. As Harold Bloom writes, “Freud sensibly wished us to settle for ordinary unhappiness.”[vii]
As a father, Freud appears to have raised his children “to settle for ordinary unhappiness.” In the same work Freud shares an anecdote concerning his “peculiarly . . . matter-of-fact” child, who, after being held rapt by a fairy tale, would ask whether or not it was true. When Freud answered his child in the negative, the child “would turn away with a look of disdain.” Freud cheerfully concludes, “We may expect that people will soon behave in the same way towards the fairy tales of religion.”
Few fathers are less like Freud than Tolkien: he composed fairy stories for his children and he insisted that they glimmered with truth. He knew what Freud thought of myths and religion and was unperturbed. His speaker in “Mythopoeia” declares, “Yes! ‘wish-fulfillment dreams’ we spin to cheat / Our timid hearts and ugly Fact defeat!” Sure, Tolkien admits, humans possess a psychological mechanism that makes them yearn for an ennobling reality beyond the bleak world of sensuous experience. The existence of such a natural yearning is not proof (at least not from a Freudian perspective) that the supernatural thing yearned for exists, but it does not disprove it either. If anything, it suggests that it exists: “Whence came the wish, and whence the power to dream, / Or some things fair and others ugly deem?” Tolkien shifts the question from psychology to metaphysics, and the answer to his question of how humans come to judge degrees of beauty is the same as Aquinas’ answer on how degrees of perfection came to exist—God. According to Tolkien, in making fairy-stories we act in the image of the God who made us as the characters in the fairy-story of history. History, then, will not settle in Freud’s ordinary unhappiness, but will take the fairy-story turn to a Happiness beyond our conception.
Hart and the Kinds of Truth
So, Sidney and Tolkien share Hart’s view on the proximity of the truth of fiction to the truth of God; nonetheless, I suspect that both would have been deeply skeptical of his argument. At first glance, it is likely that Sidney would have followed Augustine and that Tolkien would have followed Aquinas in the categorical denunciation of lying. Sidney, concerned with the accusation of lying, writes, “The poet nothing lieth, for he nothing affirmeth.” In Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, lies are typically associated with the diabolical Melkor, and the virtuous Faramir quips in The Two Towers, “I would not snare even an orc with a falsehood.”[viii]
Despite what reservations they might have due to their reverence for the truth, I suspect that Hart is simply drawing conclusions from their own presuppositions on truth that they have not fully appreciated. The key dichotomy is described clearly by John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock in Truth in Aquinas: “[T]ruth is primarily in the Mind of God and only secondarily in things as copying the Mind of God.”[ix] Thus, truth is only secondarily a “correspondence of mind to thing” and is primarily the correspondence of the mind “to the divine intellect.” Hence, facts may be less true than lies when lies are in greater accord with the divine intellect than facts. Considered ontologically, whether or not the poet “affirmeth” something is not the key issue.
Hart gives an example that shows the ingenuity of his argument, which does not defend merely polite lies or lies of convenience, but rather lies in extreme circumstances. He uses the case of a person hiding a Jew from Nazis, wherein the mere concealment of the truth would easily be detected as obfuscation, and wherein one would probably end up in the hands of the Nazis, along with the Jew in one’s protection.
But when are extreme cases extreme enough? When are lies more true than facts? To answer that question one would have to know the mind of God. Not the whole of it, mind you. There’s no need to start quoting God’s questions to Job out of the whirlwind; Hart already alludes to it. Hart steers a middle path, recognizing that while we do not have unambiguous access to the mind of God, his ways are not wholly concealed from us. God speaks through scripture and through creation, but it would be “idolatrous” to mistake such revelations “for something like an exhaustive disclosure of the truth of who he is.” Theoretically, we can know something of the mind of God, but that is by no means an easy thing or the usual form that knowledge takes. One more often gains knowledge by the five senses than by divine illumination.
The Poetics of Possibility
Illumination, or, more commonly, inspiration by a muse, is common in poetry, with great writers often striving towards a kind of idealism of the imagination. Samuel Johnson writes that John “Milton’s delight,” in depicting Heaven, Eden, and Hell in Paradise Lost, “was to sport in the wide regions of possibility,” for “reality was a scene too narrow for his mind.”[x] John Keats concludes his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” with the aphorism “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”[xi] Emily Dickinson, perhaps unknowingly, echoes Johnson’s description of Milton in “466,” a lyric replete with Edenic imagery that opens with these celebrated lines:
I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –
In another poem, “448,” which Helen Vendler suggests stems from Keats’ aphorism on truth and beauty, Dickinson portrays martyrs for beauty and truth being lain in adjoining tombs and posthumously recognizing their kinship.[xii]
The idea of the inspired poet is quite old. Sidney writes, “Among the Romans a poet was called vates, which is as much as a diviner, foreseer, or prophet, . . . so heavenly a title did that excellent people bestow upon this heart-ravishing knowledge.” Among English poets, the prophetic character has long been important; the exemplar, perhaps, is John Milton, who, though blind, wrote, he claimed, an epic illumined by the uncreated light of God shining within himself. Illumination is a key epistemic metaphor. Boldly prophetic poets have since supplied a host of fiery figures, including William Collins’ “rich-haired youth of morn” born of God and Fancy, William Blake’s flame-haired Orc, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s speaker with “flashing eyes” and “floating hair,” and Wallace Stevens’ “youth, a lover with phosphorescent hair.”[xiii]
Most authors, Sidney and Tolkien among them, would probably see their words as glimpses of the divine mind, partially inspired (though Sidney would eschew the language of inspiration). They save themselves from the peril of lying by presenting their works as, and intending them to be received as, fictions. Many aspire to, but few claim to achieve, in Blake’s grand words, “To cast aside from Poetry all that is not Inspiration.”[xiv] Images of illumination are not absent in Tolkien’s work—he describes humanity in its role as “sub-creator” as “the refracted light / through whom is splintered from a single White / to many hues, and endlessly combined / in living shapes that move from mind to mind.” Nonetheless, the last stanza of the poem begins, “In Paradise perchance the eye may stray / from gazing upon everlasting Day / to see the day-illumed, and renew / from mirrored truth the likeness of the True.” “Perchance” is doing some heavy lifting in these lines, and the full assimilation of myth and truth, though achieved in the person of Christ, is delayed for humanity until the great hereafter. I suspect Hart alludes to Tolkien when he writes, with piercing eloquence, “The divine light in its purity and immediacy lies now on the other side of the prism of created being in its fallen or deluded condition, and for the most part we know that light as, at best, a scattered iridescence.”
The image of splintered light is an apt one to conclude on. It represents the movement from divine simplicity to created multiplicity, from the perfect union of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth in God to the wonderful but sometimes conflicting beauties, goodnesses, and truths of this world. Our world, to borrow Hart’s phrase, is in a state of “transcendental disarray,” and it will remain so until this age passes into the next and God is all in all. In such an interim, God’s Truth is best reached towards by considering a plurality of truths in the spirit of love, as this essay has—not uncritically—lent its ear to a polyphony of voices, including Plato and Sidney, Freud and Tolkien, a host of poets, and Hart. Though I’ve digressed rather far from Hart in this essay, I think I better appreciate his argument for it. After wandering with these thoughts, it seems to me that the metaphysical justification for humanity’s right to make believe as the virtuousness of lying out of a kind of necessity—both are rooted in the yearning not for truth but Truth. One who would not lie to some Nazis to save a Jew is, like Sidney’s historian, “being captived to the truth of a foolish world” rather than being liberated by the truth of God.
Bret van den Brink is an English honors student at Trinity Western University, whose research focuses on the interface between theology and literature. His article “Compassion’s Sweet Poison: The Sources of Thomas Merton’s ‘Origen’” has appeared in the latest volume of The Merton Annual. This summer he will begin co-hosting the podcast Mandatory Media.
[i] Quotations by David Bentley Hart are from You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature, U of Notre Dame P, 2022.
[ii] My interpretation of Plato, Neo-Platonism, and Sidney here largely follows C.S. Lewis’s account in “Sidney and Spenser” from Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century, Oxford UP, pp. 318-393. Quotations by Lewis are from that work.
[iii] Quotations by Sir Philip Sidney are from Selected Poetry and Prose, edited by Robert Kimbrough, U of Wisconsin Press, 1983.
[iv] Quotations by J.R.R. Tolkien are, unless otherwise noted, from Tree and Leaf, HarperCollins, 2001.
[v] Landon Loftin and Max Leyf write of Lewis and Tolkien’s mutual friend Owen Barfield, “The effects of his assumed materialism were exacerbated by the equally pervasive psychology of Freud,” and quote Barfield as writing, “[I] had imbibed from the whole of his 20th Century environment a suspicion, almost a conviction, that any theory implying that the world as a whole has any meaning, let alone a spiritual source, must be due to subjective wish-fulfilment.” What Barfield Thought: An Introduction to the Work of Owen Barfield, Cascade Books, 2023, p. 11.
[vi] Quotation by Sigmund Freud are from The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents, and Other Works, translated by Angela Richards, Hogarth Press, 1961.
[vii] Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader’s Mind Over a Universe of Death, Yale University Press, 2020, p. 469.
[viii] The Two Towers, Harper Collins, 2005, p. 664.
[ix] John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock. Truth in Aquinas, Routledge, 2001, p.10.
[x] Samuel Johnson. The Lives of the Poets, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, Volume XXI, edited by John H. Middendorf, Yale UP, 2010, p. 190.
[xi] John Keats. “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” John Keats: Selected Writings, edited by John Barnard, Oxford UP, 2020, pp. 475-476.
[xii] Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems and Commentaries, edited with commentary by Helen Vendler, Harvard University Press, 2010.
[xiii] Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom trace the genealogy of these figures. Frye in “Tradition and Experiment,” Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, Princeton University Press, 1969, pp. 147-86. Bloom in Take Arms, p. 430.
[xiv] William Blake, “Milton: A Poem in Two Books,” Plate 41 [48], in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, edited by David V. Eerdman, with commentary by Harold Bloom, Anchor, 1988.