Monastery of the Holy Cross

“One of the key concepts of Gaudium et Spes was the recognition that the Church, while maintaining its evangelical distinctiveness, must abandon its sectarian tendencies.  There is question of renouncing any claim to a monopoly, the affirmation of the unity and universality of truth and the recognition that dedication to truth is best evidenced by a willingness to learn.”

–Michael Casey, The Monk in the Modern World, from An Unexciting Life, St. Bede’s Press, Petersham (my emphasis)

As we celebrate Christ, the Light of Revelation to the Gentiles, it is worthwhile reproducing this bit of wisdom from Fr Casey, a great custodian of monastic wisdom.  Casey’s observation is one that can produce a good deal of reflection on the nature of Truth.  In the past, there has been a tendency in the Church to produce great systems of ‘truth’, the incredible synthesis of St. Thomas Aquinas being probably the most typical, and also the most magnificent.  But such syntheses can also be a danger, in that they can give the impression that truth is something able to be mastered by the human mind.  St. Thomas seemed to admit as much as he lay dying, referring to all his work as so much straw.

When Christ said to Pilate, “I have come into the world to bear witness to the truth,” we can with reasonable assurance believe that this truth is something greater than a series of syllogisms proving God’s existence, or demonstrating the necessity that each angelic being have its own nature.  ”What is truth?” Pilate asks, and Jesus, knowing that Pilate is ‘not of the truth’ and therefore is not capable of ‘hearing His voice,” refrains from saying what he just recently told His disciples: “I am the way, the Truth and the life.”  Truth is not a set of equations or a fortiori proofs deriving from a priori first principles.  Truth is a Person, the Second Person of the Trinity, Who reveals the Three-Personed God Who knows all things, and knows them because He loves all things that He created.  We enter into knowledge of this Truth not merely intellectually, but by love, loving God, and loving God’s creation, especially the creatures made in His image.

If you’ve read Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes, you know that three friends and acquaintances of Socrates can paint three strikingly different pictures of the man.  Indeed, the Jesus of Mark, of Luke and of John is recognizable as one man, but is also notable for the variables in the presentation of His personality.  In Mark, He is on fire, moving quickly from one confrontation with evil to another.  In Luke, He takes ten chapters to get from Galilee to Jerusalem, after He announces that as His destination.  In John, Jesus goes to Jerusalem seemingly all the time, has friends who live in the environs, and also speaks like no one else.  Which portrait is ‘true’?  The truth of any person is greater than even the composite depictions of all of his or her friends and enemies.  The truth of any person is steeped in deep mystery, and this being so, how much more is this the case with the One Who is Truth, Who came from the Father?

God is not bound by any ‘rules’ when it comes to revealing Himself, and for this reason, no one can ever have a full body of teaching that in any way approximates ‘Truth’.  This doesn’t mean that the search for truth is therefore meaningless, on that however much we apprehend of God, God is always greater.  God can reveal something of Himself to anyone, and since each individual human is created by God, we can assume that He does in fact reveal something unique in each person.  This is decidedly not to say that anyone claiming to have a revelation of God is to be counted trustworthy.  The standard of any type of revelation (and I am using this word with a ‘lower case ‘r” as it were) is its comportment with Revelation (the ‘unveiling’; the making-visible; and therefore the making-possible of a relationship with) the Truth of Jesus Christ.  The Church must listen very carefully to what is being said and help to tease out the lines of God’s speech in the contemporary world.  The Church must learn to discern the ’signs of the times’.  This is not a compromise of Her mission, but a necessary component of it.  What distinguishes the Church is not being right while everyone else is wrong, but intimate knowledge of Jesus Christ, a gift to lead others to a full recognition of Truth, and the rejection of any falsehood.