We have agreed, says Socrates, that the Guardians must be warlike and fierce in their defense against the enemies of the state. But we do not want them to turn against their fellow citizens. So we may liken their training to that of the family dog, who is trained to befriend his master and the familial circle, but who will courageously attack any threat to the family or, indeed, the neighborhood. So the dog may be said to possess a kind of knowledge; he does not, like a wild dog, attack at random from ignorance (amathia). The family dog may be said to be moral in the rude sense.
Thus, Socrates says, the future Guardians of the state must be educated morally; they must be instilled with good morals. We must therefore teach them stories of the heroes and the gods, much as our fathers did for us. But some of these stories must be modified, because Homer and the other poets and storytellers often tell us stories in which the gods commit bad acts, crimes, duplicitous homicides. Since the gods can do no wrong, these old stories must be false and, since children often identify with the figures of fiction, they may be liable to emulate the crimes of the gods as related in these false stories. And, besides, this attribution of crimes and sins and lies and schemes committed by the gods or God is wrong, since it is a given that God is truly good and given wholly to good; thus the attribution of things of evil to God is a lie and the poets who perpetuate such stories are liars.
In other words, whatever evils beset mankind, they are to be attributed to causes other than God, because God is the seat of good things only. And because God is omniscient and omnipotent, God would not be troubled by enemies or plots or the host of things that storytellers have invented. And God, being the fountainhead of all good, is also perfect. God has no need of magic, has no need of shape-shifting or any of that subterfuge that we read about in some stories, in which he might appear as a stranger at the door, and so we are to grant strangers hospice (hospitality) because the stranger might be a god in disguise. This is unnecessary and deceitful and, however entertaining it may be, is misleading and might be bad for children who are being trained to be Guardians of the state. Such misleading stories contain crucial lies about God, who is the truth.
Because a man’s soul is God immanent (God within him), in perpetuating such stories as we frequently do, we allow these stories to do harm to a man’s soul, the very essence of his being, and he cannot be led to goodness through portrayals of badness. So we may see that attributing evil acts or thoughts to any form of the god-head is a lie, kind of a mortally generated supreme lie (we do not here mean lies that we may employ against our enemies or lies that we may tell a crazy man in order to placate him, or lies told in the myths of antiquity that we may rewrite to make them serve the truth). The supreme lie is a lie against God; the lying poet has no place in our concept of God. Thus it is that the stories we tell our children must be morally uplifting, and some of the myths are not. Therefore we must winnow the myths, editing them, and, in some cases, censoring aspects of them.
