Chapel Talk, October 3, 2002

“What is Truth?”
James M. May

A reading from the Holy Gospel according to St. John (18: 33-38):

Pilate entered the praetorium again and called Jesus, and said to him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?” Pilate answered, “Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests handed you over to me; what have you done?” Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world; if my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight, that I not be handed over to the Jews; but my kingdom is not from here.” Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice.” Pilate said to him, “What is truth?”

Truth. Most every institution of higher learning in this country pledges allegiance to it in some shape or form. Harvard, our oldest, and arguably one of our most prestigious universities, has from its founding in 1636 sported a crest emblazoned with a single Latin word as its motto: Veritas--Truth. Indeed St. Olaf College in its mission statement boasts that it encourages its students to be “seekers of truth.” This is, of course, as it should be, seeing that human beings, from the dawn of our existence, seem almost to have had an inborn calling, a yearning to employ their gift of reason in order to ascertain facts and acquire understanding about the world that surrounds them and about their fellows who inhabit it. To be sure, the enterprise of education by its very nature assumes that teaching and learning through the agency of reason are not only possible, but also desirable in the greater scheme of things; schools, colleges, and universities dedicated to the pursuit of truth have flourished for centuries relying on that premise.

As we survey the landscape of colleges and universities that continue to pursue truth through the exercise of reason at the turn of the 21st century, we can see that a rather small, but persistent number of colleges and universities have chosen to conduct their pursuit of truth not only through the agency of reason, but also within the context of a relationship with the church, a relationship with faith. Among these is, of course, St. Olaf College. Although the balancing act between faith and reason that has been negotiated here and at other such colleges is often times a delicate one, it is, nonetheless, one that can be incredibly fruitful and invigorating. Despite this fact, the two concepts of reason and faith, the two words, “college” and “church,” represent, to what appears to be an increasing number of people, poles that in some way seem mutually exclusive, oxymoronic, or incompatible--that somehow the word “church” when applied to “college” restricts academic freedom, threatens our goals for diversity, or restrains us from becoming really “top notch.” The line of thinking of those who hold this opinion goes something like this: faith in a creed--in this case the Christian Gospel--implies, at least in some degree, non-rational acceptance of that creed; such acceptance, in turn, inhibits, even destroys the life of intelligence. “The consequence is that [church-related] schools, insofar as they are subject to Christian Doctrine, are thought to be less free, and the education they offer is thought to be necessarily inferior.” This sort of attitude explains, at least to some degree, the reason why so many fine liberal arts colleges and universities, which can trace their founding back to a connection with the church, e.g., Harvard, have since lost that connection and become wholly secularized.

Needless to say, colleges like St. Olaf have chosen a different route, electing to honor their founding principles, finding a liberating strength, rather than stultifying bondage in the roots of their faith. For a college “rooted in the Christian Gospel,” as St. Olaf claims in its mission statement, Pilate's question, “What is truth?” is answered emphatically by another passage enunciated earlier in the same gospel narrative (Jn. 14: 6), wherein Jesus proclaims boldly, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” Indeed, the gospel message is unambiguous: “Christ set us free from sin, from the taking of false turnings in life, which is why he is called ‘the way’; he sets us free from ignorance and skepticism, from the existential anguish of bewilderment in a meaningless universe, which is why he is called ‘the truth’; and he sets us free from the dreadful finality of death, which is why he is called ‘the life’.” Rather than binding schools like St. Olaf and restricting their freedom, recognition of the Truth with a capital T actually liberates them: “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (Jn. 8: 31-32).

Indeed, the Gospel proclaims that Christ is the literal Incarnation of Truth, truth which transcends, and is the ultimate source of every other truth in this universe. In such a context, we are called to examine things in relation not only to their existence in this world, the here and now, but also sub specie aeternitatis, i.e., in their relation to that eternal life which Christ bought for us by his death and resurrection. In this way, I maintain that a college of the church founded on faith can actually offer a more “perfect” conception of the Truth than a college relying solely on “reason.” (I use the word “perfect” in its root sense--from the Latin perfectus, which means “having been done thoroughly” or “having been fully completed.) A college of the church can offer a fuller, more complete picture of the truth, because it can offer truth sub specie aeternitatis; it can examine truthful statements like 2+2 = 4, George Washington was the first president of the U.S., -am is the accusative, singular, ending of the first Latin declension, etc., as truths in themselves, which ultimately have as their source the Divine, Ordering Truth, God, who, as Creator of all things out of nothing, is the origin of every other truth.

If St. Olaf were a secular college, it would still boast a solid and excellent academic program; there are, of course, hundreds of colleges that legitimately do so. The “specialness” of this place is and must be the fact that we consider the faith of our founders not to be an impediment to reason, but actually its support and helpmate in our pursuit of truths, truths which find their ultimate source in the Divine, Transcendent, Incarnate Truth of the Good News.

On that first Good Friday some 2000 years ago, a Roman governor named Pontius Pilate stood face to face with the Truth made Incarnate, whose loving sacrifice on Calvary freed him and all people from the bonds of sin and slavery. The Roman governor, either too blind or too skeptical to acknowledge its presence, asked what seems to us to be the ultimately ironic question, “What is truth?”

Let us pray to God today and every day that we, who by his Divine Love are inheritors in the economy of Salvation, might, through our use of both reason and faith, find the courage and the grace to acknowledge and embrace his Divine Truth when we, as did Pilate, stand face to face in its presence.

“A Proposal for the Fulfillment of Catholic Liberal Education: The Founding Document of Thomas Aquinas College,” pp. 17-18.

Christopher Derrick, Escape From Skepticism: Liberal Education As If Truth Mattered (1977). I read Derrick’s book more than 20 years ago; its major theses, as I recall them, have largely provided the basis for this talk.