TRUTH, MEANING AND FAITH: HOW TO APPROACH THESE QUESTIONS?

 

(On March 7, 2014, the Dominican Center of Institutional Studies, or St. Dominic’s Center of Studies, celebrated solemnly the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas at St. Paul’s School, Macau. The morning celebration consisted of three parts: lecture, Mass and fraternal agape. More than one hundred people attended the memorable event. The highlight of the celebration was the public lecture given by theologian Felicisimo Martinez, OP, who is currently teaching at the University of Saint Joseph. Hereafter, we print the excellent text of the conference)

 Saint Thomas begins any discussion with one question, even the discussion about the existence of God. Answers without questions are absolutely useless.

1. 1.     Questions about truth, meaning and faith.

Truth has become a real question, because for many people truth has been associated with dogmatism, fundamentalism, violence, intolerance…Therefore they refuse even to talk or to listen to talk about truth. But, what would be life if there is no truth at all? In the last moments of Jesus the question about truth is dramatically present: What is truth? This question continues been present today, but in a real practical way. Where is truth? Who are on its side?

The adequate relationship with truth is not appropriation, but questioning, searching, looking for, approaching… Only God is the owner, the Lord of the Truth; we are mere servants. God told to a rabbi: “Look, here on one of my hands I have the truth, on the other one I have the instinct of the truth, please, which is your choice?” The rabbi answered: “Lord, give me the instinct of the truth, because the whole truth is your own property”. We, human beings, have to learn how to live, not with full security or total certitude, but with many questions and uncertainties. That means that we have to learn a culture of trust and confidence.

We enjoy today an enormous scientific and technological progress. We know every day more and more, and at the same time we become more aware of our ignorance. But day after day we feel more insecure regarding the question of truth. “Today’s man is the man of “perhaps””. In this situation we observe the continuous growing of fundamentalisms, dogmatisms, relativisms… Many people refuse to believe in the ideal of the truth but at the same time they think they are in the right position.

There is today a crisis of confidence; there is a general suspicion, mistrust towards anybody and towards everything. While we speak once and again about transparency, a kind of culture or un-culture of mistrust and diffidence is widespread in any area of our society.  We do not trust the politicians, the economists, the mass media, even the scientists… We do not believe that they tell the whole truth…  We have more and more information, but we do not know whom to believe. Truth is not more associated to the dignity of a person.  Some persons pretend to be honest and honorable without been truthful. Here the real problem is not the objective, but the subjective dimension of truth: truthfulness, living in the truth.

A dangerous enemy of truth today is what is called “politically correct”. It has become a kind of a dictatorship, compelling us to a certain auto-censorship in all areas of our life. But freedom is the first condition for a person to tell the truth and to live in the truth. “Truth is truth, says Saint Thomas, not because it is spoken by many people, but because it reflects things as they are”.

Enemy of truth today is also certain pragmatism. In front of dramatic situations of injustice and enormous suffering, those who are responsible for those situations do not want the real truth to be known; on the other side what the victims really want is practical solutions to their dramatic problems. Deeds, not only words!  What really the Commissions of the Truth are investigating in many countries are not only words, and many times atrocious deeds.

Enemy of truth is many times the history of the same truth, the use and abuse of the truth, which has widespread blood, crime and death all through history of mankind.  And so truth remained associated with intolerance and violence.

And, according to Saint Thomas, another enemy of truth is mental laziness, because searching for truth demands a lot of effort, of ascetic effort, of renunciation. And that we do not like too much.

In modern society the interest for the esthetic is growing every day more and more, as the interest for ethical problems is also growing, sometimes due to a real convictions sometimes due to some urgent needs. There is no that much interest regarding the question of truth. Some people are aware of the devastating results of falsehood as a way of life, as a companion of injustice… But today most of the people think that lying is absolutely meaningless and has not transcendence at all. Even more, they do not associate truth or lie with morals. When we speak about war or genocide we are very much worried about injustice, violence, human rights…, but we do not care too much about the enormous amount of falsehood used to covered up and justify war, injustice, genocide, etc…

But, truth is absolutely essential in order to live together, to establish harmonious relationships among persons, to live humanely… As a matter of fact, Saint Paul states firmly that the first thing that injustice has to do is precisely to stifle the truth (Rm 1, 18).  Probably this is the most powerful test of the relevance of the truth. Falsehood is the radical evil. The Gospel of John goes as far as to present the Devil as the only father of falsehood (“He is not rooted in the truth; there is no truth in him.  When he tells a lie he is speaking his own language, for he is liar and father of lies” (Jn 8, 44). Jankelevitch puts the falsehood as an essential element of the radical evil in the Holocaust.

The question of truth embraces at the same time the area of meaning and the area of faith.

Truth includes basically three levels or strata.

a. The first level is the transparent reality or the reality itself without any mask or disguise or cover up. The truth is the reality itself, things as they are, the objectivity of reality. Ellacuria used to call this “to be honest to reality, to call things by their name”. Let us observe and let us listen to scientific conclusions.  In this fist level of the truth we have to pay attention to the facts: the facts as they are. Here the different sciences have a relevant word to tell, but we should be aware that also a scientific conclusion is an interpretation –a hermeneutic exercise- of reality, not a dogmatic conclusion.   Sciences do not tell us everything about reality, not even the most important or transcendental conclusions about reality. But, at least, thanks to the scientific conclusions we can know every day more and better this wonderful world and this wonderful human nature. As a matter of fact, lying consist of concealing – for different purposes- that part of reality that we already know. Lie is not equal to error or misunderstanding; lie is to hide or to cover up something on purpose.

b. The second level of truth is related to the sense or meaning of reality. Here the exercise of hermeneutics is more needed and more complicated, especially today, because the management of meaning has become a private task of the individuals, not a public mission of the traditional institutions, let us say religions, churches, educations centers, family… E. Schillebeeckx established a closed relationship between truth and meaning. From the perspective of meaning things are not mere means, tools, objects…; they become final purpose, real values, and symbols inviting us to a transcendental experience. In this area of meaning the pluralism is spreading everyday more and more in our culture, and the chance of consensus is lessening every day more and more. The meaning of human being, of freedom, of happiness… is so different even for different people in the same culture! Searching for truth and meaning today demand a lot of humility and dialogue. (Saint Thomas compares this task of searching for the truth with the hunting sport, all participants coming together like a team to catch the animal). This dialogue about meaning is absolutely needed today since the lack of meaning leads a person towards a kind of vital emptiness, existential disorientation, even to suicide.  (This is the main point in the whole work of Viktor Frankl. The central statement of his doctrinal system is this: The real drama in human life is not the lack of pleasure, but the lack of meaning). These questions about meaning are closely related to the deepest questions of human being: the meaning and destine of our life, the problem of suffering and, what is to expect beyond death?… Are these not practical questions? Ignoring them is to put ourselves at our back, as Saint Augustin says in his Confessions. “Then, you, my Lord, took me from my back, where I had put myself in order not to see me, and you threw me against my eyes”.  This level of truth demands from us a real exercise of the contemplative dimension of our life.

c. The third level of truth places us at a theological level. It considers the salvific dimension of reality, the deepest capacity of reality accessible only to faith. The Vatican Council II invited to respect the autonomy of mundane reality. But this autonomy is compatible with this salvific dimension of the same mundane reality. In this salvific horizon mundane reality becomes creature and has a vocation, a destiny, finality. This salvific projection has been revealed all along the history and specially in the personal history of Jesus of Nazareth, the new man and the origin of the New Creation. For the believers God is the truth and the truth is the world of God. Out of the truth God can´t be, can´t exist. Out of the truth, what appears is inhumanity. These statements are not easily accepted in the secular culture, which is closed in it, blocked to any Transcendence. Faith has become a question more than a solution for many people.

In all these three levels it is very important to distinguish error and lie, ignorance and lie. Error and ignorance have no ethic connotations. They are not mortal enemies of truth; they are simply the absence of truth. Meanwhile lie has ethic connotations. It is a mortal enemy of truth, it is radically immoral. Jon Sobrino put the problem in these terms: “The main purpose of human being is not to pass from ignorance to knowledge, but from lie to truth”. And Don Miguel de Unamuno states: “Death is lie, truth is life, and if truth leads us to die, it is better to die for truth than to live lying, to live dying”.

2. Attitudes to approach truth, meaning and faith.

In this second moment of my talk I´ll present some attitudes which can facilitate our approach to truth, meaning and faith. Let us be clear from the very beginning: these attitudes facilitate, show the way, and indicate the direction…, they are not absolute guarantee. There are people already with these attitudes and notwithstanding they say they are not sure about truth, meaning and faith. By talking about these attitudes all I want to say is that it is easier to approach truth, meaning and faith in these conditions than in the contraries.

Many and different are the attitudes to facilitate our approach to truth, meaning and faith. It is important to be clever, wise, profound, honest, humble, open-minded, simple, confident, and ready to listen to the Word… But no one can be so much talented, with so many virtues at the same time. I´ll present only the attitudes I consider more relevant for our purpose. For the rest our task will be to pray so that strong faith will be given to us or that our faith does not become weak.

a. Cultivating a culture of confidence and trust.

First of all, faith is an anthropological phenomenon. Only in a second moment it becomes a religious phenomenon. First of all faith is a necessary condition to make it possible a real human relationships between human beings. Faith is a condition to make possible for people to live together in a just, harmonious and gratifying way.

Human being is anthropologically speaking a believer, and, many times, very much credulous. Most of the knowledge we have, we learned by believing other people, by trusting them. Many of our securities and certainties are based more on faith than on scientific knowledge or personal experience. Modern man and woman is much more credulous than he or she believes. Not only in the area of religion or para-religious phenomena, but also in scientific matters. If people eliminate from their mind all the archives they have learned trusting other people, their remaining ideas would be very few. Most of the ideas we assure to be true and certain is due not to an objective evidence, but to the fact that the mechanic, the doctor, de scientific, the philosopher, the theologian… assure us to be true and certain.  Objective evidence is not abundant for most of people.

Faith is related not only with knowledge. It has another dimension even more specific and transcendental: the personal dimension. Faith is a way of relationship among persons. This relationship goes beyond mere knowledge; it embraces the totality of communication, communion among people. Here to say “I believe in you” means “I believe what you are telling me”. But it means especially “I trust you”, beyond any objective evidence. Without any objective evidence, this confidence gets highest degree of firmness and security. “I believe in you”, “I trust you”: these are expressions approaching us to the culture of confidence and trust.

The culture of confidence and trust has two main dimensions.

First of all, this culture has a personal dimension. “I believe in you” means “I trust you”. That means a close personal relationship of full confidence, a kind of personal encounter, a certain relationship of love, of communion, of personal communication. This personal encounter is possible because one person manifests his or her oneself, his or her personal identity… and the other person responds with an attitude of faith, of confidence, of trust. Both of them offer themselves generously, to make the encounter possible.  Both, personal auto-revelation and personal confidence have their last motivation in love. That is why K. Barth said in one of his books:  “only love is worthy of faith”.

Second, the culture of confidence has also an intellectual dimension. Just because my master is for me worthy of confidence, he becomes a fountain of knowledge, of illumination. His moral authority is for me guarantee of truth in all what he says. To trust him means also to trust his word, to trust what he says, without fear to be induced to error. And so faith is not contrary to knowledge; it is a real possibility of knowledge, but in other way, in other key, from other perspective. To let oneself be informed, to be taught, instructed and trained, to be illuminated, to be revealed… is a real exercise of faith and confidence. Saint Thomas calls this the virtue of “docibilitas”.  “Faith makes man not blind, but helps him to see more and further…”

Modern culture is enemy of the argument of authority and tradition. To say knowledge means to say “critical reason”, “critical knowledge”, “empirical knowledge”… Tradition and authority are underestimated or, at least, are suspicious as fountains of knowledge. In order to reach the adulthood, modern culture demands from human being to be liberated from tradition, authority and faith.

Of course, objective evidence is the supreme degree of natural knowledge. But we should not forget an elemental fact of human history: our first learning is by faith or based on others authority; let us say parents, teachers, adult persons, professors… In most of the matters we do not know by ourselves; simply we believe what the specialists tell us, we trust them. Without faith, trust and confidence… there is no way of learning, of progress in knowledge.

Unfortunately a culture of mistrust is spreading today. Shaking hands is not more enough to close a contract. We need the signature of the parts, the lawyer, registrar… Every contract must be with signature and seal in order to be valuable. This culture of mistrust or disbelieve has spread towards persons and institutions.

It is necessary to retrieve the culture of trust and confidence in order to place us in the way towards truth, meaning and faith. Religious faith is essentially an experience of confidence and trust in other person, in the Other with capital letter. When a person lacks confidence she closes herself within herself and so such person becomes blocked to faith.

b. Cultivating the culture of heart.-

The questions of truth, meaning and faith… must be often translated from the stage of mind to the stage of heart, from the level of ideas to the level of vital experiences. This is not a mere invitation to emotivism or sentimentalism, but a claim for an integral consideration of human being.

Modern critical reason meant a relevant progress towards the adulthood of mankind. No doubt. Much dogmatism, both religious and secular, was destroyed. But critical reason itself became in some way an idol, became a kind of god, a dogma, and closed the door toward truth, meaning and faith. These three values inhabit not on only in our critical reason but also in the habits of heart. We can approach them through intuition, emotion, ethical sense, esthetic feeling… We should not place critical reason against the habits of heart; it is question, not of splitting but rather of putting together, of harmonizing different ways of approaching truth, meaning and faith.

Let us take theology as an example. In the Scholastic the rational exercise, the demonstration, the justification, the scientific argument… prevailed so much, that there was no place for experience of faith. Faith itself was mainly defined as the mere acceptance of certain truths previously defined by the magisterium.

No objection to this worthy intent of theology to present religious faith as something reasonable. The reasonable dimension and the existential dimension of faith should not be divorced. Neither a cold rationalism nor a sterile fideism is convenient to religious experience. We are bound to purify constantly our concept of God, of the incarnation, of resurrection, of salvation…

The believer is committed to understand and to formulate in some way what he believes. But in this exercise he should never forget that the central point of faith is the experience of confidence in God, of trusting him, and this is a habit of heart.  A mere theoretic acceptance of the dogmas can leave human heart absolutely indifferent and can leave a person absolutely distant from God, not having any incidence at all in his or her life. Such a theoretic acceptance of the dogmas can be existentially empty of truth and meaning.

Many problems of faith, truth and meaning become more and more dramatic inasmuch they become trapped in the rationalistic area, far  away from any existential and heartily dimension. In the three areas of truth, meaning and faith we often move between the cold rationalism and the irrationality of fideism. Fideism sticks to the truth, the meaning, the faith without reason, and even against reason. The rationalism considers that truth, meaning and faith are simply question of arguments. That can produce great intellectual success and satisfaction, but probably will leave a frozen soul and a personal history absolutely unchanged, and without any valuable challenge.

The Bible associates truth, meaning and faith with the nucleus of the person, that what the Semitic culture calls “heart”. In that center come together and from there flow the most transcendental experiences of human life: trust and disbelief, communion and loneliness, openness to other and isolation, courage and fear… In that center are rooted the attitudes which shape and form the whole life of a person, those which make it possible to trust other people, to offer confidently one´s life, to have the guarantee of been in the right way even when we lack rational securities…

c. Cultivating the contemplative dimension in life.

All we want to underline here is that the contemplative dimension facilitates the approach to truth, meaning and faith much more than a dispersed, banal, diverted and dissipated life. Pascal was a special master in this question. He considered the contemplative dimension of life a special condition to approach truth, meaning and faith, more than a life absolutely diverted and alien to the great questions about the mystery of this cosmos, and the meaning and destiny of human existence.

All along history many philosophers searching for wisdom and many mystics searching for God experience came to the same conclusion: “Noli foras ire, in interiore enim hábitat veritas” (Do not go outside, within you inhabit the truth). Saint Augustin, with his wonderful capacity of interiorization, was very much aware of that and made an excellent formulation: “Oh my Lord, I was looking for you outside, and you were inside”. And that is why he could find neither God nor the truth. In his Confession he describes this error in a magisterial metaphor: “Then, you, my Lord, took me from my back, where I had put myself so that I could not see me, and threw me against my eyes”. ¡Wonderful!

Contrary to live in the depth is dispersion, banality, di-version in the sense of Pacal. This diversion consists of being always distracted by any noise and external rumor, but mainly by any intellectual or affective interference, by mere banal curiosities…  It consists of being indifferent to the main and transcendental questions of human life. Where we come from? Where we go? Why there is so much suffering and injustice? Why death and what after death? Is there any reason for hope after death?…

But there is not only contemplative dimension towards the interiority of the subject; there is contemplative dimension towards outside, the cosmos, things, events, history… This contemplative dimension allows us to contemplate objects and events, not as mere tools or facts, but as signs, as symbols, full of meaning and significance. And so we proceed from mere scientific knowledge to a true wisdom.  Wisdom, sapientia, sapere…means to enjoy the flavor of reality and history.

When we reach this level of the truth and contemplation we are placing ourselves on the way of faith. This contemplative dimension does not move us away from the world and history. Neither we can nor should we escape from this world and history in order to be awarded with the gift of faith. But we have to be in the world with mystical and contemplative eyes. Contemplation is the way of looking at reality from the depth; it is the exercise which allows us to go down to the depth of reality and to the profundity of the historical events and to transcend the mere appearances, so that we can catch the whole meaning and plenitude of things and events. Only this contemplative vision can reveal the real possibilities of human history, the whole truth and meaning of human existence.

d. Openness to experience of Transcendence.

We should begin here making reference to the experience of being a mere creature. But it seems to me that this language belongs to a religious creed: “we believe in one God creator of heaven and earth”. This creed helps us to conceive ourselves as creatures, and invites us to recognize and accept the sovereignty of the Creator, to accept our finitude, our limitation and to adopt an attitude of recognition and veneration.

People alien to any religious experience, do not think of any creatural relationship; they only think in terms of finitude and limitation. Some of them live this finitude peacefully and with no pain at all. Many people live this finitude like a real drama of human being, bound to swing in tension between this finitude and the desire for the Infinite. This desire is an open door to the ultimate truth, meaning and faith.

The experience of finitude can open our path towards the experience of transcendence. But the experience of transcendence has two fundamental versions: the mystical one related to the experience of the Infinite, the Absolute, the absolute Transcendental Being; and the ethic one related to the experience of the Other, opening us to other subjects.

The mystical version of transcendence is not private or exclusive of Christian religion; it is shared with all religious traditions. Even more, this mystical experience has also not religious versions, secular versions. Every day more agnostic and not religious persons claim the right to have their own spirituality, their mystical experience, their secular experience of Transcendence. They have their time for prayer, meditation, contemplation…

This mystical experience of transcendence is based on the experience of finitude, on the consciousness of limitation, on the desire for the Absolute. Modern culture is a culture of autonomy without limits, without frontiers. The subject has become a God for him or herself. It reminds of the first temptation in the Bible: “God knows that as soon as you eat it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods knowing both good and evil” (Gn 3, 5). On the contrary the experience of finitude allows the subject to overcome any isolation in itself, any temptation of being like God, of closing any horizon for the future. The awareness of finitude opens new dimensions to human beings. We do not know all we are capable to. We need to become aware of our finitude in order to be open to the experience of Transcendence. This experience helps us to maintain open the door so that our human vocation can be expanded beyond our natural capabilities. This is the real target of our infinite desire of knowledge, of our desire of going into the core of the mystery of reality, of our desire of love in plenitude. ¡May the Absolute come to our encounter! This openness to the transcendence is an important approach to truth, meaning and faith.

Other version of the openness to Transcendence has an ethic character. It is related to our openness to other subjects, to our relationship with other persons. This version is specially needed today in the post-modern culture, when a radical individualism is widespread, producing much of isolation and loneliness in many people. We are invited to go outside of ourselves, not for dispersion or di-version, but to encounter the other, to experience communion and plenitude. Just the other makes it possible for us to know ourselves, to become responsible and moral subjects, to be really humans. The other, specially, the wounded person allows us to discover our condition as moral subjects, as responsible subjects. It reminds us of the second great question in the Bible: “Cain, ¿where is your brother Abel?” (Gn 4, 9). Here is another way of approaching truth, meaning and faith.

The mystical experience of Transcendence leads us into the depth of reality and eventually allows us to Felicisimo Martínez, O.P.encounter a kind of absolute Presence wrapping all our life. On their side the ethic experience of Transcendence leads us towards the face of our neighbor and eventually allows us to understand our life as an exercise of dialogue, of trust, of faith and encounter with other people. Both experiences place us in the way and can facilitate our approach to truth, meaning and faith.

Felicisimo Martinez, O.P

Macau, March 7, 2014