Pretty Little Lies? - Part II
On Sacramentality & Sentimentality
This is the second of a two-part series on the reliability of fiction.
For Part I, click here.
In our last installment (Pretty Little Lies – Part I, October 2025) we saw that, through the medium of signs and symbols, human beings can powerfully communicate realities to one another, even when the ‘story’ told is not a factual report of something that actually happened. By understanding that the events in a fictional story can still really interpret the world around us by using signs and symbols to communicate, we are able to see Truth reflected back at us through our narrative mimesis, or imitation of the real.
Similar to the pleasure we gain from obtaining the good, or in perceiving the beautiful, Aristotle recognizes that we reach a similar delight from a good imitation; our intellect delights at identifying a known entity in a new medium. Further to this, when we recognize human life being imitated, our emotive life is also moved and the process of working through a true and poignant emotive arc can have genuinely corrective effects on our own emotional and ultimately moral life. Through seeing good character arcs played out to their true end, we gain a kind of experiential knowledge that grounds our own experience and embeds in us universal truths. If a story reflects reality in a way that we recognize as true to our experience, other aspects of that story can teach us, in turn, to see more of that reality than we might otherwise know by our experience. In this way, we can actually learn both speculatively and particularly through events that are not strictly real. We can also work through our own emotional arcs vicariously, recognizing in the fictional a genuine trajectory for the real. This Aristotle calls ‘catharsis’, and its effect is powerful in not only assisting us with more comprehensively interpreting the reality around us, but also in communicating convincingly things we might only understand abstractly. Through catharsis, fiction can actually connect us with the True and teach us the Good.
But as we saw that the power of beauty can be double-edged (O Precarious Ally, April 2025) so too can the power of catharsis. The intensity of the delight or resolution that comes with this ‘cleansing’ of the emotions, this encounter with a well-imitated truth, can easily be confused for the actual truth. In possession of a partial truth, we can trade this simulacrum for reality itself, and, having worked through the emotional arc, we can think we have done the moral work that needs doing.
In Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross’s last work, The Science of the Cross—the manuscript of which lay open on the desk of her cell as she was arrested by the Nazis in Holland in 1942—she makes some initial remarks about the relationship between Saint John of the Cross’s poetry and his sanctity. Reflecting on his artistic nature, she notes that he did not stop where some artists might be tempted to:
“[I]t is clear that there is a danger in artistic inclination, and not only when the artist lacks an understanding of the sacredness of his task. The danger lies in the possibility that in constructing the image, the artist proceeds as though there were no further responsibility than producing it… But the Crucified One demands from the artist more than a mere portrayal of the image. He demands that the artist, just as every other person, follow him: that he both make himself and allow himself to be made into an image of the one who carries the cross and is crucified.”
Saint Teresa Benedicta here highlights the dangers of our mimetic capacity—in imitating, we often think we are achieving the end, but this is rather like reading a book on climbing Everest and then believing that we have summited. Of course, it is not all black and white; as I said before, there is some real learning that we achieve in fiction, but I think we can all agree that producing such lessons in our actual human acts, translating those truths into the realities of our daily lives is the true end of moral action, and that which conforms us to the likeness of the Father.
Our quest for the Truth, for knowing and loving, is one we have to complete. Like Samwise Gamgee, our work must come to fruition on the slopes of Mount Doom, we cannot simply enjoy the epics from the Shire. (And what we would miss, if we did!)
The Riddle of Strider in J.R.R. Tolkien’s invented language of Tengwar. (Calligraphy by Aglargon on DeviantArt.)
So, why does this happen? Why do so many stop at the story and not go on to the Truth? Of course, it isn’t as clear as all that. Many take very seriously the truths they have learned from fiction. In fact, the convention halls are a sign of this! As a life-long fan myself, I have met some very serious moralists in Jedi robes, or speaking fluent Quenya—in a sometimes very strange world, the code of a Star Wars or a Lord of the Rings can be very attractive, and the Truth within these stories can resonate very deeply. What is often missing, however, is the connection between that fictional code and the reality that it is imitating.
So, what is the reason for the disconnect? I believe the answer is: despair.
In our postmodern world, skepticism about Truth claims and our ability to know them, what Pope Benedict XVI called our ‘strict agnosticism’, prevents us from taking the step from fiction to reality. While something within us recognizes something good and beautiful in the fictional, we refrain from believing that such is reflective of the real world, because we have been taught to doubt any overarching narrative in the real world. We are taught that the only thing worth trusting is ‘experience’, and that this experience is ours to cultivate. As such, we draw a line, and what is fictional becomes beautiful precisely because it is not the real world, but a ‘fantasy’ in the modern sense of being divorced from reality and subject to our own creative whims.
Having emptied fiction of its truth claims, all that is left to us is the catharsis that fiction induces within us physically, and particularly emotionally. The emotional ‘hit’ becomes the purpose, and fiction becomes not a sacramental connection to the real through sign and symbol, but a sentimental simulation of experiences. And, since experience rather than intelligible meaning is the end of our being in this view of the world, a simulated experience is as good as any other—we become vulnerable to any deception that promises us a dopamine spike. Thus, we are tempted into a virtual reality of sorts, in which—if we let ourselves get taken in—real actions become the dull background to the vivid realities we create for ourselves.
In short, reality can evaporate in exchange for the pretty little lies we tell ourselves.
But what if we refuse to concede this dull view of the real world? What if the postmodernists are wrong, and we can know reality, and more, reality’s Maker? What if the real world is as wild, exciting, and, yes, dangerous, as the fictional adventures we craft? More poignantly, what if our actions—our genuine choices, our outright moral agency—matters? What if we do not need to trade in good bread for the mere smell of baking?
Having recognized that fiction is a capable of both great truth and great deception, it is clear that we must fix our eye on the Truth, our proper goal, if we are to profit from it rather than be derailed. Fiction, then, is only good quality fiction when it is an effective mimic of reality in some fashion, and it is powerful fiction when the author brings symbols harmoniously together to help us view a particular reality with clarity in the broad world of information clamoring in through our senses. Fiction can filter out the rest to make a particular view very clear to us, with the result that wisdom can be shared, and universal truths can be more vividly understood, and we can see, even if just for a moment, the glorious End towards which we are all travelling. It is this that keeps fans coming up at all hours and in all sorts of get-ups, but it is a passion that needs to go one step further. In order for fiction to really be the balm we need, we need to be able to look beyond the effect (the joy, love, delight) to the Cause, from Middle Earth to the Truth that inspired it.
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