This book examines a recurrent balancing problem rather than a body of doctrines: how is it possible to aim at truth while, at the same time, firing lies? More specifically, under what conditions can fictitious narratives about divine beings be considered beneficial or even necessary for the proper functioning of society? For ancient and medieval intellectuals it was hardly deniable that religion contains narratives that are, at least prima facie, fictions: what divided them was how to respond to that appearance. The book takes as its point of departure the Parisian condemnation of 1277, which censured the proposition that there are fables and errors in the Christian religion just as there are in others. The inquiry stretches back to the Sisyphus fragment and the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, as well as the Roman historians, and follows the problem through Augustine, Macrobius, Isidore of Seville, and Averroës to the thirteenth-century debates involving Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, and Siger of Brabant. The author argues that responses to religious fictionalism can be distinguished, first, by the way in which different authors distribute truth and utility across audiences, practices, and contexts, and, second, by whether they regard the balancing of conflicting requirements as the solution itself or seek to eliminate the problem instead. In the context of this book, assigning fixed labels such as "atheist", "theist" and the like is relegated to the background. The focus is instead on the ways in which religious narratives and ritual practices constitute relevant parts of different forms of life. In this sense, this book is not exclusively about the ancient and medieval tradition it discusses, as the significance of the topic extends beyond the immediate context of the history of philosophical thought.

Gábor Borbély received his Ph.D. in 1994 and is a professor at both the Jewish Theological Seminary – University of Jewish Studies (OR-ZSE) and Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest. Before taking up these positions, he conducted research at the University of Innsbruck (1991), was an Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellow at the Warburg Institute in London (1998), and taught philosophy at several universities in Hungary. In 2017, he also taught at Tel Aviv University. From 1997 to 2003, he served as Director of the Office for Higher Education Programmes at the Hungarian Ministry of Education; from 2003 to 2005, as Head of the Department for Higher Education Programmes and Scientific Affairs at the Ministry; and from 2005 to 2008, as Director of the Institute for Philosophy at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In addition to numerous scholarly articles, his publications include a Hungarian translation of and commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s De unitate intellectus (On the Unity of the Intellect: Introduction, Translation and Commentaries, Ikon/Klett-Cotta, Budapest, 1993) and an introduction to medieval philosophy, Civakodó angyalok [Quarrelling Angels: An Introduction to Medieval Philosophy] (Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 2008). He is also co-editor of Credo ut intelligam or Credo quia absurdum? Reason and Beyond Reason in Religious Faith (Budapest, 2020) and Metaphysics Through Semantics: The Philosophical Recovery of the Medieval Mind: Essays in Honor of Gyula Klima (Springer, International Archives of the History of Ideas 242, 2023).