Factual honesty is common. Much of it has less to do with principle than cowardice. A factually honest person might only lack faith in his ability to lie, and calculates that the risk is not worth the reward.

A braver and therefore rarer honesty is one that pursues truths where lies cannot be exposed: the truth of faith, which lives in this question: How much do I truly believe this?

If we are faithful, we can rarely answer: Wholly.

If we are faithful, we often dislike where we answer: Wholly.

What do we believe wholly? Base truths. Ordinary truths. The truths we despise and would love to transcend.

What do we believe only partially and ephemerally? Higher truths. Moral truths. The truths we most love.

The base truths we would most love to doubt into oblivion we believe wholeheartedly and stubbornly.

The higher truths we would most love to believe wholeheartedly arrive and depart by their own whim, condense and evaporate, oscillate between utter persuasion and incomprehensible nonsense.

Many, and maybe most, are factually honest. Vanishingly few are faithful.

The faithless are so negligent toward faith that it no longer occurs them to question, much less lie, about what they truly believe. “Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.” If you don’t question, you do not know, and what you say cannot be a lie, and of you do not lie that makes you honest.

Ordinary faithless people outsource their faith labor to those with whom they agree, all of whom have done the same. Is there anyone in such communities of faith who is believes from the heart, in whom the communities belief is rooted? Nobody asks because all are blind, deaf and numb to such questions. Everyone agrees to agree.

More exceptional faithless people “do the work” of forcing beliefs upon themselves — and beliefs about how strongly they believe these beliefs. They self-bully their way to the strongest possible conviction.

Might it be these self-bullying true believers who are the nucleus of belief communities? Are these the exploited workers in the sweatshops of ideology, to whom the faith labor is outsourced?

Faithful people offer truths to their heart and witness with urgent interest how the heart responds. Does she smile and accept the gift? Does she scornfully reject it? Does she ignore it as unimportant?

A faithful philosopher crafts elaborate ideas to offer his heart. He makes the highest and most beautiful and most promising ideas he can conceive. Most immediately fall flat. Some are accepted for a moment, played with for a moment and abandoned. The higher the truth, the more fleeting the joy.

Once, twice, maybe thrice in a lifetime, the heart keeps a high truth for her own.

Such high truths are enceptive seed crystals of strange enworldments.

This I know.

“Supposing truth is a woman — what then?”

Truth is not a woman. But wisdom is, and her name is Sophia.

Any idea she loves feels true.

If wisdom loves an idea, we will bet our own life on it.

But her sister determines whether we win our bet and live or lose it and die.

Wisdom’s sister is fact, and her name is Material.

A general is a philosopher who dies if he is wrong.